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How Hillary Frames Science: Social Progress, Economic Development, and Public Accountability

Without necessarily intending to, in her speech last week Hillary Clinton demonstrated just how irrelevant some criticisms of the "framing science" thesis have been. Consider: Hillary is a politician, and she wants to deliver a message about science--a vastly complex subject with many diverse aspects. So what does she do? Well, duh, she frames. She pares down complexity, and emphasizes only those aspects of science that are tailored to resonate with her core audience. For a politician speaking about science, it could scarcely be otherwise. Not only is there nothing wrong with Hillary's use…

Tomatoes, Lycopene, and the FDA

The href="http://www.fda.gov/default.htm" rel="tag">FDA just can't win.  When they restrict something or say something negative, they are being too restrictive or complicit with big pharma.  When they approve something too slowly they are insensitive to the needs of patients.  When they approve something too quickly they are not protecting the public.   In fact, I've criticized them on all of these counts, all the while knowing that it very difficult to know when the FDA is being fair and balanced. Now, we see headlines about a health claim that the FDA has denied.  It concerns href…

Professional science journalism

I've taken a few pokes at the bad science of Rhawn Joseph and the Journal of Cosmology over the years — for instance, in this post summarizing an article that was little more than a thinly threaded excuse to show off pictures of women in bikinis, or this post about their claim to have found bacteria in meteorites. I think my criticism must have stung. Check out the bikini post at the Journal of Cosmology now. It's been removed, with the disclaimer, "CENSORED This Article Has Been Censored and Removed Due to Threats and Complaints Received." I am amused. I wouldn't take all the credit, since I…

Endocrine Disruptors

Yesterday, both href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel and I posted about the unexpected effects of lavender and tea-tree oils: they've been implicated as causing gynecomastia in boys.  href="http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=gynecomastia&image22.x=20&image22.y=18">Blogpulse indicates that the Blogosphere has reacted quite a bit to this: the blog at href="http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2007/02/lavender_oils_f.html">Wired News picked it up, as did href="http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=377">Skepchick, href="http://…

What's the point of peer review?

Once again, I'm going to "get meta" on that recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication I mentioned in my last post. Here, the larger question I'd like to consider is how peer review -- the back and forth between authors and reviewers, mediated (and perhaps even refereed by) journal editors -- does, could, and perhaps should play out. Prefacing his post about the paper, Bora writes: First, let me get the Conflict Of Interest out of the way. I am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication. I helped the journal find reviewers for this particular…

An estimation problem for math teachers

You thought I was going to talk about a problem that math teachers could use, didn't you? Well, maybe math teachers can use this. (note: when I say "teachers" I really mean "learning facilitators") It all started when I read this valedictorian speech from Erica Goldson. Here is part of it: "I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the…

Swoopo

Over at The Big Money, Mark Gimein has a fascinating article on Swoopo.com. Gimein calls Swoopo "the crack cocaine of auction sites" and says it's "the evil bastard child of game theory and behavioral economics." The site works like this: Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for that $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple (AAPL) for $1,349, but let's not quibble. Either way, it's a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each "bid" the price of the computer…

Birds in the News 124

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Female Ocellated Turkey, Meleagris ocellata, in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the Southern Yucatan in the state of Campeche. They are endemic to the region and are known locally as both Pavo Ocelado or Guajalote Ocelato. Image: Kevin Sharp. [larger size]. Birds in Science If you read nothing else in this issue of Birds in the News, then this is the story to read. A serious affliction has been observed in birds in the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state; Long-billed Syndrome…

Another Week of GW News, September 28, 2008

Another Week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom September 28, 2008 Top Stories:Methane, GCP CO2 Report, WCI, RGGI, Carbon Trust Report, CGI Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Finance & Climate, Amphibian Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Tutorials, Solar Cycle Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods &…

Why we lecture

Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery. I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat... So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…

Why is Black Lung back?

by Carole Bass (posted with permission from the On-Line Journalism Project, New Haven (CT) Independent) Black lung disease used to be nearly as common as dirty fingernails among American coal miners.  Roughly a third of them got the fatal illness.  Starting in the 1970s, a federal law slashed that rate by 90 percent. But now it's back. When Anita Wolfe and her co-workers discovered that the rate of black lung has doubled among U.S. coal miners in recent years, she took it personally.  The daughter and granddaughter of West Virginia miners, Wolfe watched her father die of black lung disease…

More evidence that it’s hard to be an expert consumer of healthcare

The US spends far more on healthcare than other advanced countries, but we have worse health outcomes. Ideally, we could slow the growth of healthcare spending and improve outcomes by investing in prevention, creating incentives for providers to give high-value care, and eliminating care that’s unnecessary or harmful. While many of the efforts to achieve these goals involve arrangements between payers and providers, some also target consumers. However, as two recent pieces by Vox’s Sarah Kliff make clear, it’s hard to turn healthcare consumers into the kind of savvy shoppers who can contain…

Who Was Bill Hicks?

"To me, the comic is the guy who says 'Wait a minute' as the consensus forms. He's the antithesis of the mob mentality. The comic is a flame – like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are." Bill Hicks After writing yesterday's list of the greatest comedians, it has occured to me that a lot of people just don't know who Bill Hicks was. To those of you who don't, let me assure you that it is worth your time to seek out his work and I'd like to start you off in the right direction. This will be a more complete introduction to Hicks and his comedy, along with links to the…

Postdoc precipitates DNA, exposes Colorado Rockies logo ripoff to Woody Paige

Last Monday marked 17 years since Eric Young led off the first Colorado Rockies baseball game with a home run that triggered a collective, mile-high orgasm for the 80,227 spectators gathered in the old Denver football stadium. The advent of the expansion Rockies also launched a Pharmboy laboratory birthday celebration week tradition marked by two days off: one for a lab ski day in the high country followed later in the week with a Rockies game and the finest handcrafted ale offered by Denver's Wynkoop Brewery. I was reminded of this by my Twitter buddy, Mike Smith (@M1k303) who taunted me a…

True love lasts a lifetime as demonstrated by fMRI (bleh!)

Seriously, when I read the headlines to this article, I wanted to wretch retch. (Ed. I need to learn how to spell.) Scientists discover true love Scientists: True love can last a lifetime I can feel it welling up now...eh...OK, I feel better. Just to be clear, I didn't want to wretch retch because I am a deeply cynical person who scoffs at the notion of true love. (That is true, but not why I wanted to wretch retch.) I wanted to wretch retch because scientific research like this inevitably results in the worst kind of popular tripe when communicated in journalism. We are talking the most…

Balance

Roland Deschane Science is always working a tough room. It's inherently progressive — we're constantly achieving incremental improvements in our understanding, with occasional lurches forward…and sometimes sudden lurches backward, when we realize that we got something wrong. We're performing for a crowd, the general citizenry and most importantly, the funding agencies, that expect us to fix problems and make the world better, and they're a fickle bunch who will turn on us with disdain if we don't keep delivering new medical therapies and tinier electronics and more spectacular robots…

Does all this blogging about quackery really accomplish anything?

Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I'm doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet, and a year or so after that, I found the home of all quackery on Usenet, misc.health.alternative. From around 1998 to 2004, Usenet was my home, and that's where I fought what I thought to be the good fight against irrationality, antiscience, and quackery.…

Acupuncture and COPD? Not so fast...

I acquiesce. I know that I'm not going to have a lot of control over my selection of blogging material for a given day when I see more than one or two requests for an analysis of an article. So it was, when links like these were showing up in my e-mail: Acupuncture May Help Ease Symptoms of COPD Acupuncture May Be Worth a Shot for COPD: Small Study Shows Acupuncture May Help People With COPD Breathe Easier These two news stories refer to a study from Japan by Suzuki et al published online yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of…

Friday Fractal X

When you peer into a fractal, you're seeing the edge of chaos. If you sift through enough Julia or Mandelbrot sets, you might catch a hint of fractal fever. When you find that point, where order is filtered out of randomness, and glimpse a familiar pattern, you might feel tempted to shout "Eureka!" That triumphant feeling is, of course, much older than the computers that generate fractals. We've been seeking precious patterns for centuries. Compare this fractal image, taken from a section of a Julia set colored with fractal Brownian motion... ...with a much older sorting method: Panning for…

Cassandra Callender, the teen who refused chemotherapy, has relapsed

I hate these stories, because they so seldom end well. Unfortunately, this one is more messy than even the usual messiness of the typical story of this type. The type of story I’m referring to, of course, is one that I’ve told from time to time ever since near the first year of this blog’s existence, that of the child or teen with cancer who, for whatever reason, refuses curative chemotherapy in favor of some sort of quackery. The litany of names depresses me to contemplate: Katie Wernecke, Abraham Cherrix, Sarah Hershberger, Daniel Hauser, Makayla Sault...the list goes on. In the vast…

Unitary mindfulness in collective action

In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated: ... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…

Birds in the News 172

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Lear's Macaw, Anodorhynchus leari: a great example of a conservation success story. Image: Andy and Gill Swash, World Wildlife Images. Birds in Science A record number of bird species are now listed as threatened with extinction, a global assessment has revealed. The IUCN Red List evaluation considered 1,227, or 12%, of all known bird species to be at risk, with 192 species described as Critically Endangered. The main threats affecting bird numbers continued to be agriculture, logging and invasive species, the…

Restoration

In some ways, we may be fortunate that the house we chose falls in a middle place in time - old enough to have character and beauty and a kind of solidity, new enough that we don't feel compelled to restore it to a past moment in time. Nor do I worry too much about the scratches the kids put in the pine floors or the authenticity of any particular improvement, although we aspire to keep the place beautiful and suitable to its landscape. My home is a fairly comfortable, moderately shabby work in progress, a mix of old and new that could be done better, but that mostly serves our needs. So…

Circus of the Spineless 37, A Blog Carnival for Invertebrates

tags: Circus of the Spineless, invertebrates, insects, arachnids, plants, algae, blog carnival Welcome to Circus of the Spineless! This is the migratory blog carnival that specializes in all things spineless, and the contributions that you'll find here range from essays and photoessays, to photographs with some accompanying explanatory text and even a few videos. This blog carnival has seen some scary times in its recent past where it almost went extinct, but thanks to some friends of mine who are much more expert in spineless things, it was revived after I made a bunch of noise about…

There's A(nother) Bird in My Future

Image: Brent Ward; Sedgwick County Zoo. Thanks to a friend, who shall remain unnamed, it looks like I will be adding a bird to my flock, a species that I bred for many years before I left Seattle for NYC (a species that I gave up when I moved to pursue a career that seems to have gone nowhere, unless you think of the Coriolis Effect, as it applies to a swirling toilet, as "going somewhere"). To say the least, I have missed my birds so terribly, so deeply, so desperately at times, that this one little guy (girl?) will add a little something to the stillness that my vanished flock of…

No one can shoot himself in the foot like anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield

Blogging is usually such an instant gratification sort of thing. I see a story or hear about something. I write about it. I almost have to. Most stories in the blogosphere have a really short half-life anyway. Wait more than a day or two, and no one cares anymore. Hell, wait more than a few hours in the case of hyperkinetic bloggers like P.Z. will be all over it. However, sometimes it's a good idea to restrain myself, not to leap on something right away even when I can. This is one of those times. Last week, I was tipped off by the merry band of anti-vaccine loons over at Age of Autism to a…

Andreas Moritz and trying to shut down valid scientific criticism: A sine qua non of a quack

What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism? I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…

Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards

The deadline is approaching for you to submit your preferences for the Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards. For purposes of discussion, here are (most of my) choices: Best Linux Distro: I'm sticking with Ubuntu, even though I'm increasingly annoyed at several aspects of it. I chose Unbuntu because it was the distribution that allowed me to transform from someone who kept trying to make Linux work but never could to someone who uses Linux almost exclusively. The few times I've tried to use a distro other than Ubuntu, I've not had much success, and thus it remains as my choice, though I hope…

Blomberg's toad and its omosternum-bearing buddies

Once more, we return to those wonderful, phenomenally successful, charismatic beasts.... the toads. As you'll know if you've read the previous articles in the toads series, it seems that most basal divergences within crown-Bufonidae happened in South America. So far as we can tell right now, crown-toads are ancestrally South American, and all of their early history happened on this continent [Rhaebo blombergi image below from here]. All of the basal toads looked at so far - the relatively small, slender-limbed, shallow-snouted members of the clades Melanophrynicus, Atelopus, Osornophryne,…

Fertile Inquiries: A Very Basic Primer on Creating and Maintaining Soil Fertility

Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn't think we'd be proud of this, but what can I say, we're a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I've got my own candidate for the worst soil ever - the stuff in the beds around my house. Oh, texturally, it is among the best I've got - sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn't too wet like much of the rest of my soil. It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here. But a…

Teleportation of Toddler Toys

Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus, I will now explain the physics of quantum teleportation using SteelyKid's toys: "Wait, wait, wait... You're not seriously planning to explain something quantum without me, are you?" "I could hardly expect to get away with that, could I. No, I'm happy to have your contributions-- the book is about…

A chiropractor strikes back at the Institute for Science in Medicine...again

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a rather clueless chiropractor by the name of J.C. Smith (JCS), who decided to take a swipe at an organization with which I'm associated, namely the Institute for Science in Medicine (ISM). It was such an inept attack, filled with misinformation, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies, that it was what I like to call a "teachable moment" when it comes to chiropractors and chiropractic. Even more amusingly, JCS promised at the end of his post lambasting ISM as a new "medical mafia" that he would be writing a followup post. I could hardly wait. The…

Has Western medicine lost its soul?

If there's one message that I've been trying to promote, regardless of whether it's on this blog or my not-so-super-secret other blog, it's the concept that there should be one standard of evidence—one scientific standard of evidence—for evaluating health claims and medical treatments. It doesn't matter if it's the latest drug from big pharma, the latest operation from a hot shot surgeon with a lot of creativity and not necessarily the most rigorous dedication to science- and evidence-based medicine, the woo-filled claims of alternative medicine practitioners, or the seemingly "evidence-based…

Mike Adams brings home the crazy over, of all things, the Caduceus

I have a love-hate relationship with Mike Adams. Mike Adams, regular readers of this blog, is the "intellectual force" between that repository of quackery and sheer lunacy, NaturalNews.com. I hate him because he is a vile human being who cheerfully promotes bogus therapies on his website. (You know, I think we skeptics should borrow Simon Singh's phraseology at every opportunity.) He's also an opportunistic ghoul who never, ever misses an opportunity to take advantage of a celebrity who's suffering from or dying of cancer to make breathlessly hysterical claims that they would have lived if…

Antivaxers marched on Washington last week. It was less than impressive.

Last week, I took note of something that antivaxers hadn't done in nine years, specifically a "march on Washington." Back in 2008, Jenny McCarthy and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey led a rag tag rogues' gallery of antivaccine activists on a march and rally that they called "Green Our Vaccines." The name of the rally, of course, derived from a common trope beloved of antivaccine activists that I like to refer to as the "toxin gambit." It's basically a Food Babe-like fear of those "evil chemicals" writ large in a claim that vaccines are packed full of horrific chemicals that are Making Our…

αEP: The fundamental failure of the evolutionary psychology premise

This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here's the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come. I have a real problem with evolutionary psychology, and it goes right to the root of the discipline: it's built on a flawed foundation. It relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of how evolution works (a basic misconception that reminds me of another now-dead discipline, which I'll write about later) — it appeals to many people, though, because that misconception aligns nicely with the cartoon version of evolution in most people's heads, and it…

The Work of Bill Demski's New Best Buddy: The Law of Devolution (part 1)

As several of my fellow science-bloggers pointed out, William Dembski has written a post at Uncommon Descent extolling an "international coalition of non-religious ID scientists", and wondering how us nasty darwinists are going to deal with them. Alas for poor Bill. I'm forced to wonder: is there any purported ID scholar so stupid that Bill won't endorse them? In his eagerness to embrace anyone who supports ID, he didn't both to actually check who or what he was referencing. This "international coalition" turns out to be a lone uneducated crackpot from Canada who uses his ID beliefs as a…

Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News: Lying by omission about the murder of autistic teen Alex Spourdalakis

The damaged done by the antivaccine movement is primarily in how it frightens parents out of vaccinating using classic denialist tactics of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, antivaccinationists are often proud of their success in discouraging parents from vaccinating, with one leader of the antivaccine movement even going to far as to characterize his antivaccine "community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire," as being in the "early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees." Meanwhile, just…

Transcript of AU Forum "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, & Politics in an Unsustainable World"

American Today, the weekly newspaper for American University, ran this feature on last week's AU Forum and public radio broadcast of "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World." My graduate assistant Brandee Reed has also produced a transcript of the panel which I have pasted below the fold. I was joined on the panel by AU journalism professor Jane Hall who served as moderator, and fellow panelists Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones magazine. The transcript is not quite professional quality, but it does provide…

Water at the Movies: 2013 Update

Water is a theme that runs through all forms of popular culture, from books to myths to Hollywood and international films, with a growing number of shorter video pieces posted online at YouTube and similar sites. Having trouble keeping your Netflix list populated? Below are some classic (good and bad) movies – good and bad – with some kind of water theme: conflict over water in classic western movies; science-fiction thrillers with a water component; visions of the apocalypse where water access or contamination plays a role; and more. (An early version of this list was published in the last…

Roger Bate: Tobacco consultant or lobbyist?

John Quiggin has some comments on Roger Bate's response to our article in Prospect on Rachel Carson. My response to Bate will take more than one post. Let's start with this paragraph: I was never a tobacco lobbyist. After I wrote two articles on tobacco-related topics in 1996 and 1997, I consulted for Philip Morris, at their request, on international health for a total of about a month in 1998. I never lobbied for the company or promoted cigarettes in any way. I subsequently wrote to Philip Morris asking them to provide funding for a campaign to rehabilitate the use of DDT. This letter,…

Ben Stein sez "It's ok not to think"

If creationists had their way, today would be the "Waterloo" of evolutionary science. Lab equipment would begin to collect dust, once proud scientists would have to find jobs flipping burgers, and creationism's Trojan horse (intelligent design) would successfully "reclaim America for Christ," all thanks to a little documentary called Expelled. The film has been surrounded by controversy from day one, not only for it's propaganda-like vibe, but also for the dishonest tactics employed by the creators of the film. Popular songs have been lifted without permission/under shady pretenses, computer…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update # 39: Nuclear Explosion at Reactor 3?

The radiation at the Fukushima plants has gone up, rather than down, since June. This may be because contaminated water has become more concentrated due to evaporation. The release of radiation from the plant into the air continues, although a covering over Reactor 1 is almost completed. The release of radiation from the plant into the sea continues, and plankton are shown to be contaminated to a level that raises some concern. Mid month, the plant was measured to be releasing about 100 million becquerels per hour. The reactors are still not uniformly shut down to less than boiling.…

"Consumer warnings" about Adya Clarity: Has Mike Adams had a sudden attack of conscience?

I've been blogging about alternative medicine for nearly seven years and writing about it, either on Usenet or in other forums for several years before. As a result, there are times when I start to think that maybe I've seen it all. And almost every time I start thinking that, I come across something that leaves me scratching my head and either joking about learning something new every day or just scratching my head. This case will be the latter. Regular readers all know Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger. Adams created NewsTarget.com which later evolved into NaturalNews.com, one of the…

Meow!

  (Athena takes her ease) A couple of readers have asked me to describe all the people and critters on our farm - they are newer readers or old ones who know things have changed a bit but not how, so I thought I'd do a series of short posts introducing you the residents.  For some reason, I thought we'd start with the cats. The cats are the only true pets on our farm.  That doesn't mean they don't have a purpose - they do, of course, the obvious pet control,  but ultimately we'd have them (although probably not quite so many) even if we had no use for them.  We're just kinda cat people.  I…

Many Hands

Over the last 50 years, the average American has seen their private space more than triple. In the 1950s, the average American, according to Pat Murphy's excellent book _Plan C_, had 250 square feet per person. By 2005, the average American had 850 square feet of space in their home per person. And we want more - even bigger houses proliferated during the boom, with more amenities to allow people to be away from each other - private studies and bathrooms, media rooms so you don't have to watch tv with anyone else... Now some of this may have been good and welcome - there is a case to be…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 150 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

December Pieces Of My Mind

I wonder if Chuck Berry likes death metal. Windows 8 is amazingly bad. It's so complicated and sluggish that it has to display a progress bar when you delete or move a file locally. Interesting ethno-political misunderstanding, all my fault. Chinese Swedish dude says he doesn't like the traditional Swedish Christmas buffet. I agree with him, so I comment briefly that he should check if the restaurant has some good Chinese food instead. An on-looker interprets my comment to mean "Why don't you just go back to China if you hate our traditional culture so much". Student shows me the design he's…

Falsehood: Nature maintains balance.

There is a lot of evidence that nature is in balance. An invasive species throws off the balance of nature in a given region by out-competing some similar indigenous form. When something destructive happens there is a return to status quo, eventually. A few cold years are followed by a few warm years, or a few dry years are followed by a few wet years. So, why is "Nature maintains a balance" a falsehood? Remember what makes a statement a falsehood (refer back to our earlier discussions on this issue). By now you realize that some falsehoods are better than others. "How can a falsehood…