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SVPCA 2007: lepidosaurs, turtles, crocodilians, the plesiosaur research revolution continues

So I've done the pterosaur meeting; now you all know all about it. But what about the 55th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, held at the University of Glasgow between August 29th and September 1st, and described for some reason as 'The best conference ever', I hear you cry? After much deliberation I have decided to do a brief rundown of the tetrapod talks: and my intention is to be as brief as possible about talks and their contents, not to review them at length or properly summarise them. As usual, I regret that I'm only covering those talks that appealed to me…

Names and faces featured in Worker Memorial Day reports, new database

I can’t help but contrast last week’s release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of workplace fatality data,with the reports issued this week by community groups to commemorate International Workers’ Memorial Day (WMD). BLS gave us the sterile number: 4,585. That’s the government’s official, final tally of the number of work-related fatal injuries that occurred in the US in 2013. But groups in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and elsewhere have already assembled workplace fatality data for 2014. Better than that, they’ve affixed names and stories to the numbers. The information comes in the…

Classic Edition: Shut Up and Calculate, Already

I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well. This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in August of 2002, and is at least vaguely relevant to the recent discussion of interpretations. It's been a while now since I talked about science stuff, mostly because there hasn't been any news that I felt strongly…

Computers Seized in Cyber-Thief Investigation (updated again)

I've decided to update this blog entry (20 Dec 2011) because it occurs to me that certain things could be misinterpreted, in no small part because of the common language that separates us across various national borders, and differences in the way debate and concepts of free speech operate in different lands. I want to make it clear that I do not think that the blogger "TallBloke" a.k.a. Roger Tattersall has broken British law. British authorities are obviously vigorously investigating what might be a criminal act, what might be an ethical violation, what might be a mere violation of…

Why you sound so stupid when you say "global warming has stopped"

Science is good at seeing things that you can’t really see. For example, science can provide an accurate three dimensional model of a critically important molecule even though no one has ever directly seen what this molecule looks like. That three dimensional model of the molecule can be used to understand things such as a) how life works and b) how to address some important disease. Science can measure the exact proportions of each of several elements that are invisible that make up the air. We can sense the air but we can’t see Nitrogen vs. Oxygen vs. CO2 in the air, while Science can.…

Global Warming is the Real Thing, but "Global Warming" is not the real problem

As is the case with most things that are important, we as a society have done a very bad job of developing an effective conversation about Global Warming. The vast majority of electronic and real ink that I see spent on the discussion of Global Warming (outside of the peer reviewed literature) is not even about climate or climate change. Rather, it is about talking about climate change, the politics of climate change, critique of the rhetoric about climate change, clarification, obfuscation, complaining, accusing, yelling or belly-aching, and the occasional threat of violence. And today,…

The Papacy Pastiche

So, you know, I had this idea for a novel. I started it, but I've since discovered that jewel-like prose and engaging story-telling is a little bit hard, and when I couldn't finish the whole thing over lunch, I've sort of given up. But then I had another brilliant idea! I'll put up the first significant piece of the story, the really really important part, and let you people finish the rest for me. Just post the subsequent chapters in the comments, and I'll splice them together and publish them and make a million dollars, and even more when I sell the movie rights. I'll be sure to include…

I get emails from crazy people

Working on for scienceblogs.com, I would say that I receive more interesting emails than the average person. Most of these emails are legitimate such as offers to send me books to read, and those are always appreciated. Some of the emails quote scripture and say that I am going to burn in hell. I would have to say that I appreciate those as well; I rather doubt the people would send them if they realized how much they put a smile on my face. Well, here is one for the crazy record books. Because this email is truly deserving of ridicule, I will interject. from time to time. To wit:…

Kadath's Sound Advice To The Lovelorn

When this first came up, I thought it was really outside the scope of my blog. But then I thought about all those stories you hear about women on tech campuses getting "glommed" by clueless nerd boys. I remembered dating catastrophes and tragicomedies from my own undergraduate days, a hundred years ago. And I thought, well, maybe there is a place for at least some brief commentary on this topic. In the comments to this blog post, Anonymouse asked Granted, a lot of the behaviors described elsewhere (tit-grazing, eg) are very much not appropriate, but how exactly DOES one go about the…

Abraham Cherrix: Still battling Hodgkin's lymphoma five years later

When you've been at this blogging thing as long as I have, it's possible to be shocked at how long you find yourself commenting on the same story. As I approach the end of the seventh year of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, I find these "senior blogging moments" popping up from time to time. One such story is that of a young man named Abraham Cherrix. I first learned of Cherrix back in June 2006, when, a few months after having been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 15, Cherrix, supported by his mother, decided that he didn't want to take any more chemotherapy and…

Why don't you rant about what I think you should rant about?

I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…

Crassigyrinus, or... How I'd love a giant killer Carboniferous tadpole for a pet

Today I submitted another one of those long-delayed manuscripts. Yay. I also got to work preparing one of the three conference talks I'm supposed to be giving this year - how the hell I'm going to pull off all three I'm not sure. Anyway, leaving well alone the whole picture-of-the-day debacle, it's time for a proper post. Last time we looked at the edopoids, one of the most basal clades of temnospondyls, and in the next post I plan to write about some of the other basal temnospondyls. Ever trying to recycling old text that sits, un-used, on disks, drives and memory-sticks, here I'm going to…

Note to Scientists: Ultimately, It's Up to Us to Decide If We Want Supplemental Sections

I've railed against the rise of supplemental data and methods before, but, having just reviewed a paper where I spent more time reading the supplemental sections versus the actual fucking paper, what Scicurious wrote struck a chord with me: Sci wishes she could make her own flowchart of supplemental data. It might look like this: Does the journal have ridiculously short page/word limits compared to the ridiculously huge amount of data they require for publication? Yes. Are your methods way too numerous and complicated due to the ridiculously huge amount of data required for publication? Yes.…

Will the boss have your Tamiflu?

That pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche would have trouble meeting the orders it received for its antiviral Tamiflu was well known and not a surprise. Roche's manufacturing method is said to be laborious, dangerous in spots and have a long production cycle (NB: shorter and cheaper methods have since been discovered but it isn't clear anyone is using them to make Tamiflu at this point; see our post here). So it has surprised and upset many to see the drugmaker marketing Tamiflu to businesses, essentially inviting them to move to the head of the line. With only a fraction of the doses needed…

DrPal, tell us more about HPV and cancer

OK, if you insist. This comes with the usual caveat directed at scientists that I know this is oversimplified, but I wish to reach the largest audience possible. Feel free to correct my mistakes, but please don't bother me about oversimplification. So here's the deal. Several decades ago, it became scientifically fashionable to believe that most cancer had a viral cause. This belief coincided with the discovery that some viruses do cause cancer. And while it turns out that most cancers are not caused by viruses (probably), many of them are. Viruses can cause cancers in a number of ways…

SILENCE IS THE ENEMY

About a week ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote an eye-opening op-ed in NYTimes - After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist. In Liberia, and probably in some other places, the end of war does not automatically mean the end of rape: Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes find that to get good grades, they must have sex with their teachers. The war, and the use of rape as a weapon of war, changes the…

Notes from the road: a trip to Corpus Christi and a drama in the airport

Every now and then, people hire me to travel places and give workshops for college instructors and teachers on using bioinformatics. In a couple of weeks, I'll go to Long Branch, NJ. This week, I went to Corpus Christi, Texas and gave two workshops at Del Mar College; one on using Cn3D to understand protein DNA structure, and another on using BLAST to identify the source of unknown DNA sequences. Del Mar College has a beautiful science facility, with an amazing assortment of fancy high tech equipment. The workshops were fun and I enjoyed seeing the student posters showcasing work on the…

Sunday Function

We're doing two functions today. If I'm not mistaken we've done each of them separately, but there's a famous and interesting relationship between the two that's always interesting to look at. Like very many interesting mathematical facts, it has to do with the prime numbers. As such the first function is the log integral Li(x), usually defined in the following way: We'll plot it in a minute, but if you're interested in a rough idea of it's behavior it so happens that Li(x) ~ ln(x)/x. That is, those two functions have a smaller and smaller percentage difference as x becomes larger. Now…

A questions about those ancient bacterial fossils…

Both Jerry Coyne and Larry Moran have good write-ups on the recent discovery of what are purportedly the oldest fossil cells, at 3.4 billion years old. I just have to add one little comment: a small, niggling doubt and something that bugs me about them. All the smart guys are impressed with this paper, but this one little thing gives me pause. I'm a microscopist — I look at micrographs all the time, and one of the things I always mentally do is place the size of things in context. And I was looking at the micrographs of these fossils, and what jumped out at me is how large they are. They're…

Fish Oil in Pregnancy: What it Means

I've been following the fish oil story for a while, ever since a href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/5/407">small study in 1999 showed potential benefit in patients with bipolar disorder.  The theoretical basis for the study was that omega-3 fatty acids alter neurotransmission in a way that is similar to lithium and valproic acid.  A href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/163/6/969">recent review in Am J Psych. Says the same thing that most other articles have said over the past seven years:  CONCLUSIONS: Deficits in omega-3 fatty acids…

How hard is that SF?

I got a request to collect participants for an online survey on science fiction — take a look and help out if you want. It's long, and a little depressing: it's a list of science fiction movies and TV shows, and you're supposed to rate their scientific accuracy. I think I'm rather picky about that, so just about all of 'em got slammed when I did it. I am conducting a small pilot-study on the properties of various sci-fi works (focusing on film and TV in particular). For the purposes of this study I designed two web forms (Web-form 1 & Web-form 2) that ask participants to rate sci-fi works…

Stone Age Graveyard Reveals Lifestyles of a Green Sahara

A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a "Genetic Map of Europe" (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement of humans in and around North Africa and adjoining areas. Here I am passing on the press release and photos without comment, so that you can have the information right away. TWO SKULLS. (Dark Skull, left) Radiocarbon dated at 9,500 years old, the skull of this mature…

No, no, no! Fifteen times, no!

A couple of weeks ago, I noted a new trend among the antivaccine glitterati, or maybe I should refer to it as a new trope. That particular trope is to refer to anyone who has the temerity to stand up for science, support vaccines, and criticize antivaccinationists like the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism or the moms full of the arrogance of ignorance over at The (Not-So) Thinking Moms' Revolution as "bullies." Part and parcel of this trope is to try to portray aggressively countering the antivaccine misinformation that flows from such sources in a seemingly unending stream as…

Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs

The Hapsburgs are one of those royal families who are relatively well known, and in the minds of the public are to a great extent the emblems of the downsides of inbreeding. To painting to the left is of Charles II, king of Spain, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and an imbecile whose premature death at the age of 39 ushered in a period of dynastic chaos which led to the War of Spanish Succession These conflicts between France and other European powers were one of those turning points in history, a sad capstone to the long reign of the Sun King, Louis the XIV. France's position as the…

Ken Ham, baffled

Crazy Ken Ham has learned about the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and he has written his confused, garbled version of what it's all about. He's also done his typical cowardly routine of complaining about the convention and also, by the way, about me, but refusing to mention any of us by name, let alone linking to us. He can't have his readers actually seeing what the other side has to say, after all; the world must be filtered through the benevolent and opaque lens of the Maximum Leader, you know. At least it's fascinating to watch a weak mind struggle to grasp something he doesn't…

de Jong's "hit it hard and early" paper

Over the weekend Menno de Jong and his many collaborators published a detailed clinical study of 18 H5N1 patients diagnosed and treated in Vietnam in 2004 - 2005 (Nature Medicine, subscription only). Thirteen of the cases died and five survived. Like many papers that have received media attention, it has important and interesting findings but has also been over interpreted, or at least its findings have been generalized too much. In this case, it is the fault of the authors. de Jong et al. did virological and immunological studies in 18 bird flu cases and 8 other cases with the more usual…

Librarians, institutions, soldiers, revolutionaries

One of the central tensions of modern librarianship is how to allocate limited resources to both make the whole world a better place and to serve our local communities by providing them with the services and collections they need to support their teaching, learning and research. The particular way we try and change the world that I'm talking about here is working to create a fairer and more equitable scholarly communications ecosystem. We do this by both advocating for increased openness in the publishing system and working to actually create that fairer system via our own local open access…

Modeling flu responsibly

Last week another mathematical modeling paper made the newswires. If you wonder how this happens, the answer is that universities and companies have PR departments that put out press releases. Services like ScienceDaily aggregate and package these press releases for journalists and others (like us). Since a mathematical paper in a specialized journal (in this case it is PLoS Computational Biology) is not likely to be read by a reporter, especially a reporter on deadline, it isn't surprising the news stories follow the press release rather than the paper. In this case, I am sorry to say, the…

New issue of Journal of Science Communication

The December 2009 edition of the Journal of Science Communication is now online with some intriguing articles - all Open Access so you can download all the PDFs and read: Control societies and the crisis of science journalism: In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault's work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to "discipline" (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Danielle Lee

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Danielle Lee from the Urban Science Adventures! © blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I am Danielle Lee and I am a biologist. Specifically, I study animal behavior from an…

Five years and $10 billion later, but process safety problem halts production at brand new U.S. oil refinery

When the deal was made five years ago, officials were proud to announce it was the first refinery expansion project in the U.S. in 30 years.  Motiva Enterprises' CEO Bill Welte called it a "momentous occasion" for his firm and its owners Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco.  The final product would be the largest refinery in U.S.  It was projected to produce more than 12 million gallons of gasoline per day from crude oil shipped initially by tankers from Saudi Arabia to the Port Arthur, TX site. Fast forward to the grand opening ceremony on May 31, 2012 where five executives including Shell's…

Who Won The First Democratic Party Primary Debate?

Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb faced off in the Facebook-CNN sponsored debate. Who won? The individual who "won" is the individual whose poll numbers went up the most, and we don't know that yet. But there are other ways to win, and other ways to talk about winning. Winners Barack Obama I am pleased to note that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination were not running away from the President. That proved to be a bad strategy for House and Senate Democrats during the last election, and we are not seeing it today. One of the…

On the Interconnectedness of Things

I finally got a copy of Cox and Forshaw's The Quantum Universe, and a little time to read it, in hopes that it would shed some light on the great electron state controversy. I haven't finished the book, but I got through the relevant chapter and, well, it doesn't, really. That is, the discussion in the book doesn't go into all that much more detail than the discussion on-line, and still requires a fair bit of work to extract a coherent scientific claim. The argument basically boils down to the idea that the proper mathematical description of a universe containing more than one fermion is a…

Ye Olde Problem of Evil

I sometimes write about the relationship of the problem of evil to evolution. Darwinian natural selection is a rather unpleasant business, you see, making you wonder why a loving God would employ it as his method of creation. My experience with anti-evolutionists has been that this is a point of special concern for them. Virtually every book proposing to reconcile evolution with Christianity devotes a chapter to this (or at least a major section), and some theologians write whole books about it. I devote a chapter to it in Among the Creationists. You hardly need Darwin to point out that…

Communicating Mathematics

In an opinion piece for the New York Daily News, published in July 2012, mathematician Edward Frenkel and school superintendent Robert Ross write: This Fourth of July will forever be remembered in the history of science as the day when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced. The last remaining elementary particle among those predicted by the Standard Model of three forces of nature finally revealed itself through painstakingly assembled data of billions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the most sophisticated machine ever built by humans. But one important aspect of this…

Journosplaining 101

Over at National Geographic's other blog network, Ed Yong offers a guide for scientists talking to journalists. Like everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, this was immediately re-tweeted by 5000 people calling it a must-read. Also like nearly everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, some of it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Given our respective areas of interest, there's approximately zero chance that Ed will ever contact me to ask my opinion of a paper, but I want to push back on a few of these, anyway. Because, in the end, scientists aren't responding in…

Letter to an Older Scientist

If only I were Michael J. Fox, a letter I would send back in time. Dear Respected Mathematician/Scientist/Researcher: First of all let me tell you want an honor it is to write to you from the future. Your work is so important in my time that we have named the main theorem which you proved in your paper "Megamathematical functorial categories which nearly commute" after you. Yes the JoeRandomName theorem is well known and used every day in my field. Thank you for thinking it up and proving it! But I'm writing to you today, not because of this great piece of work. Instead I'm writing to…

Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency: medical knowledge, healthcare policy, and those huge loud machines, with author Kelly Joyce

Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4 - - - The World's Fair is pleased to offer the discussion below about a fascinating new book, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, with its author Kelly Joyce. Joyce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. Professor Joyce has a degree in anthropology, a doctorate in Sociology, a resume that includes a few years of teaching at Harvard, and a kind demeanor. She is also the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Sage, 2006). Magnetic Appeal will be published in June by…

Harmony of the Hemispheres: Left/Right Cerebral Asymmetry

The cognitive science of hemispheric asymmetry has long been marred by drastic over-simplification. The left/right distinction has been associated with dichotomies like rational vs. emotional, specific vs. holistic, and analytical vs. synthetic. Such differences are much more graded than dichotomous, to the extent that they exist in the first place. So, before reviewing well-established kinds of hemispheric differences, it might be useful to dispel some "lateralization mythology." First, although the left hemisphere is generally dominant in linguistic tasks, the right hemisphere also has…

Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin

Photograph by Benjamin Reed. Ursula K. Le Guin is a internationally-recognized, award-winning science fiction writer, an elegant badass and the author of such classics as the Hugo and Nebula-award winning The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe Of Heaven, and the Earthsea novels. Last year, she began mounting formidable opposition to the Google Books Settlement, an inscrutably complex 303-page agreement reached between the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google regarding the Web giant's desire to scan the libraries of the world. The Settlement, if approved -- it…

Does Domestication Produce Dummies?

Domestication is by far man's greatest genetic experiment, and we've been at it for well over 10,000 years. While domestication can produce wild variation (see my post on dogs, for example), a few changes seem to be universal. These include behavioral changes, like reduced fear of humans and friendliness, as well as physiological ones, like floppy ears (they develop in domesticated foxes, too). One of the most well-documented differences between domesticated animals and their wild counterparts is their brains: across every species that has been looked at, the brains of domesticated animals…

Yet Another Diatribe on EMR; This Time With Actual Suggestions

You might think that developing a system for EMR would be fairly straightforward.  After all, some of the things that computers are really good for, are the storing, retrieval, and display of information.  But somehow, developing a system that actually works AND is easy to use in a hospital environment, has proven to be rather challenging.   Reading a post on the blog, href="http://infoisfree.blogspot.com/2006/12/it-in-hospital-main-hospital-i-work-at.html">Information is Free (so help yourself.) I was reminded of a few thoughts I've been meaning to disseminate.  This is on the topic of…

More data on why people reject science

Although I focus mostly on medical topics, such as vaccines, alternative medicine, and cancer quackery, I don't limit myself to such topics. True, I used to write a lot more about evolution and creationism, the paranormal, and other standard skeptical topics, but over the last couple of years I've realized where my strength is and where my niche is. So I continue to do what I do, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest in those topics. I've just learned that there are those who can do them as well as I can, while the number of people who can do what I do with respect to quackery and medical…

The anti-vaccine war on science: An epidemic of fear

Many have been the times over the last five years that I've called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the "autism epidemic." That's why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting on the issue. Indeed, reporting on this issue is so uniformly awful that when I see something this good, I want to do everything in my power to hawk the hell out of it. So, I want you to read this article in the November issue of WIRED Magazine…

How To Use Linux ~ 02 Distros

This is a continuation of a series of posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. Today, we look at the concept of a "distro" and why it is important to you as an average user of Linux. It would be nice if you knew the meaning of these terms ... OS (operating system), Distribution, Kernel, Window Manager, Desktop .... but mainly it would be nice to know about "distribution" because it really puts all the other terms and concepts together. An Operating System is a part of your computer that does not do any of the things you need your computer to do, but without which…

An open letter to David Kirby and Dan Olmsted about the Kathleen Seidel subpoena

Dear Mr. Kirby and Mr. Olmsted: You are both journalists. I realize that neither of you at present work for the traditional press and that both of you seem to devote yourselves mainly to blogging (Mr. Olmsted at the Age of Autism and Mr. Kirby at the Huffington Post), but I have to believe that you both still consider yourselves to be at heart journalists. That is why I am writing this to you and posting it publicly on my blog. If you've ever read any of my posts on this issue, you probably realize that I strongly disagree with your positions and that at times I have been quite harsh in my…

Another defense of the antivaccine propaganda "documentary" The Greater Good from the San Ramon Valley Unified School District

San Ramon, we have a problem. The other day, I laid some not-so-Respectful Insolence on a clueless school board president in San Ramon Valley, California, named Greg Marvel. What merited a heapin' helpin' of what Orac does so well was Marvel's use of school board stationery to endorse a stinking, steaming turd of a movie that is really nothing more than antivaccine propaganda wrapped in false "balance" about vaccines. The movie I'm referring to is The Greater Good, and it's going to be shown on Current TV this Saturday, followed by an online chat with the film's producers. Basically, the…

Gender Knot Ch. 1 Follow Up: Who Has The Power of the Gaze?

What does it mean when a woman ogles a man in the patriarchy? Reader RichB commented: ...men being looked at as sexual objects increases their power, but women being looked at as sexual objects decreases their power. Reader Hope isn't buying it: Really? So if I ogle a man, I'm increasing his power? If a man ogles another man, he's increasing that other man's power? Or is it just that I, as a woman, have no power to objectify a man? No power, period? What's the answer? Can a woman objectify a man, or not? Yes, she can - under certain conditions. If she's his supervisor or superior in a…

Amalgamated Book Notes: Museums, Dinosaurs, and Megalania

I have to admit that I've been somewhat lazy when it has come to sharing my thoughts on my current reading material since I moved to ScienceBlogs. On Laelaps Mk. 1 I would usually update every few days on what I was reading and what I thought about it, but since I've started writing here I've completed several books and haven't said very much about any of them. While this post is not going to be a massive offloading of knowledge gained from my extracurricular reading, it might at least offer up some suggestions for those looking for some new reading material; The Horned Dinosaurs by Peter…

LSD

There's a fascinating article in the latest Vanity Fair (not online) about the prevalence of LSD (aka lysergic acid diethylamide) among movie stars in 1950s Hollywood: Aldous Huxley was one of the first in Los Angeles to take LSD and was soon joined by others, including the writer Anais Nin. The screenwriter Charles Brackett discovered "infinitely more pleasure" from music on LSD than he had ever before, and the director Sidney Lumet tried it under the supervision of a former chief of psychiatry for the U.S. Navy. Lumet says his three sessions were "wonderful," especially the one where he…