Search Content

Displaying results 11251 - 11300 of 87950

A "distinction track" in quackademic medicine is born

The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace. I know, I know. I say that a lot, but it's only because it is, alas, so very, very true and so very, very distressing to supporters of science-based medicine. It's not as though I haven't written about it many, many times over the last six and a half years; indeed, it's become a major theme of this blog and at least one other blog that regular readers here might be familiar with. Whether it be the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) pitching woo, Georgetown going beyond electives in "complementary and alternative medicine" (…

New Wikileaks release peeks behind the scenes of America's quack

It would appear that some people got the impression that, just because I questioned whether a recent publicity stunt in which ten doctors and researchers, led by a well-known pro-GMO activist working for the Hoover Institution, Dr. Henry Miller, sent a letter to the dean at Columbia University in essence asking him to fire Oz for his promotion of quackery and, pointedly, anti-GMO fear mongering on his show was a good idea, somehow I'm going easy on Dr. Oz. Not at all. Miller and his compatriots at the Hoover Institution and the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) made what I see as…

One year later: Selective outrage over treatment-related deaths

Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…

Be a celebrity nutritionist, marry a porn star!

I tell ya, life just ain't fair. I work and slave for many years to master medicine, surgery, and molecular biology because I want to be part of developing new therapies for cancer. My reward? Instead of being in the lab directly participating in experiments, I spend more of my time begging for money to fund my lab (otherwise known as writing grant applications) than actually supervising the work that goes on there and worrying about losing the funding that I have. Pay lines for NIH grant applications keep getting tighter and tighter, and private sources are becoming way more competitive.…

About that letter

Chad Orzel says Support the National Center for Science Education: I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I'll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons: 1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts. 2) Josh Rosenau has a really good blog, one of the best on science-and-politics issues, and his day job is with NCSE. 3) Jerry Coyne is a jackass, whose latest bit of jackassery involves sending an open letter to NCSE…

Comments of the Week #95: From Gravitational Waves to the Multiverse

“What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a Good Thing, and there is the chance Nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.” -Jim Peebles It's been a huge week here at Starts With A Bang, and one of our busiest on record. If you thought that Pluto's demotion was the biggest news about the outer Solar System, just wait until you get to the highlight of this week: How fast do gravitational waves travel? (for Ask Ethan), Physicists must accept that some things are unknowable, Have astronomers found alien megastructures…

Triumph of the Generalist: Reading the Farming/Homesteading Encyclopedias

I admit it, I'm a generalist in a world of specialists, and I always have been. Looking back on my career history, for example, I see the way I attempted to make the academic model of specialization adapt to my own taste for generalism - my doctoral project was a little bit insane, integrating demography, history, textual analysis and half a dozen other disciplines across a 250 year timeline - just the sort of thing advisers hate to see. The polite word was "ambitious" but "nuts" is probably more accurate. As you can probably guess from the title of this blog (for those who haven't read…

The Hydraulic Hypothesis and the End of Civilization

OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish. I'd like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled "Systems integration for global sustainability" written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an…

Mrs. Hitler and her doctor

In 1907, Adolf Hitler's mother Klara died of breast cancer at age 47, when Hitler was only 18. The young Hitler was devastated by her death. Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler described her death thusly: These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain. Two years later, the death of my mother put a sudden end to all my highflown plans. It was the conclusion of a long and painful illness which from the beginning left little hope of recovery. Yet it was a dreadful blow, particularly for me. I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved.…

What The Entire Universe Is Made Of, Thanks to Planck!

"Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this “blunder,” rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again." -George Gamow, the father of the Big Bang model The Big Bang -- the prediction that the Universe started from a hot, dense, rapidly expanding state -- tells us where our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly expanding Universe full of…

Interview @MarsPhoenix

For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars. Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science. MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the…

What should a national health care system look like?

I was pleased to see president Obama deliver this address yesterday: Click To Play I was even more pleased because he has gathered the traditional opponents of healthcare reform around him and has convinced them to commit to reform in the US system. This is a positive sign. However, I'm concerned because, as with all political debates that challenge a dominant ideology - in this case free-market fundamentalism - we will soon see the denialists come out of the woodwork to disparage any attempt at achieving reforms that may result in universal health care coverage. This has, in fact,…

18 Months Ago Today...

...on a sticky, sweaty afternoon in July, I received a call from the head of homefinding from my local county social services agency.  These are the folks whose job it is to find homes for kids who come into foster care.  A two-day old newborn boy was being removed from the hospital, because of mental health issues in his mother.  "I know you didn't even want a baby, but it is only for two weeks.  Can you pick him up by 4pm?" (It was 2pm already) Earlier that day I had emailed another worker to say that we were ready to take another placement.  Two boys, K. (8) and C. (7) had been with us for…

More Research Linking Global Warming To Bad Weather Events

A new paper advances our understanding of the link between anthropogenic global warming and the apparent uptick in severe weather events we’ve been experiencing. Let’s have a look at the phenomenon and the new research. Climate Change: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. It is mostly bad. Sometimes it is ugly. I was looking at crop reports from the USDA and noticed an interesting phenomenon in Minnesota, that is repeated across much of the US this year: Fewer acres are in crops but among those acres that are planted there is a high expected per-acre yield. The higher yield will make up for the…

The Daily Show: Hilarious segment about vaccines, not so hilariously wrong about the politics of vaccine denialism

Not surprisingly, being a guy who leans mildly left, I like The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his writers are incredibly adept at skewering all manner of bovine excrement, be it political, scientific, or otherwise. In particular, the way Stewart and company skewered the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for its promotion of the chemical industry. Indeed, Samantha Bee, who did the infamous Little Crop of Horrors segment that mocked ACSH for its defense of pesticides über alles and its criticism of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative. Another Daily Show segment by Samantha Bee…

Mercury and autism: More Huffington Post nonsense

The whole post-Christmas thing left me without time to do anything other than a couple of brief bits. Consequently, given Deirdre Imus' two recent appearances on the Huffington Post, I thought it would be as good a time as any to resurrect this post from June 27, 2005. For those of you who haven't been regular readers that long (and I'm guessing that's most of you), this should be a good primer about why I consider the Huffington Post to have been a bastion of antivaccination misinformation and propaganda since its very inception. With the exception of Arthur Allen's occasional posts, the…

"Alternative medical income" (a.k.a. "woo pays the bills")

I've written a lot about alternative medicine, much of which I consider to be woo; i.e., treatments for which there is no medical efficacy and the belief in which often requires magical thinking. I've expressed my disappointment in medical physicians who fall prey to and become purveyors or woo, doctors such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Joseph Mercola, those pushing to "integrate" woo into medical school curricula, and physicians who sell expensive "screening tests" such as breast MRI whose value has not been shown in valid, well-designed clinical trials. All of these activities represent, to me…

It's not just oil pulling, it's ozone-infused oil pulling!

As I so love to remind my readers, I’ve been at this blogging thing a long time now. In early December, it will have been a full decade since that strange, cold, dreary winter afternoon (well, technically late fall) when, inspired by an article in TIME Magazine about blogging, sat down in front of my computer, went to Blogspot.com and created the first iteration of Respectful Insolence. At first my output was intermittent, but within a couple of months I was posting virtually every day, a habit that’s continued to this very day. About a year after my very first post, I was invited to join…

Completing a trio of antivaccine-sympathetic California pediatricians

I appear to have fallen into one of my ruts again. Or maybe it's not a rut. I just feel as though I've been doing too many posts on the antivaccine movement, to the point where I wonder if I'm starting to fall into a rut. In actuality, it doesn't really matter. If I feel as though I'm getting tired of a topic, then that's enough. It's just that the antivaccine movement, even as bottomless a font of stupidity, misinformation, pseudoscience, and quackery as it is, sometimes goes on a tear. When it does that, I have a hard time restraining myself from trying to blog about all of it, as…

Alternative Fake medicine endangers another cancer patient's life

Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with one major kind of blog post that I've done periodically ever since the very beginning of this blog, and that's the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, particularly breast cancer cure testimonials, but also testimonials for a wide variety of cancers allegedly "cured" by a wide variety of quacks. It started with Suzanne Somers and Lorraine Day, whose stories I deconstructed and showed not to be indicative of a cancer cure due to the quackery they were pursuing and continues to this day. Another, related category of post are early…

The ENCODE delusion

I can take it no more. I wanted to dig deeper into the good stuff done by the ENCODE consortium, and have been working my way through some of the papers (not an easy thing, either: I have a very high workload this term), but then I saw this declaration from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On September 19, the Ninth Circuit is set to hear new arguments in Haskell v. Harris, a case challenging California’s warrantless DNA collection program. Today EFF asked the court to consider ground-breaking new research that confirms for the first time that over 80% of our DNA that was once thought to…

Questions, questions

The inimitable John B. of Blog Meridian answered five questions posed to him on his blog, and I volunteered to do the same. His questions are above the fold, click through to see the answers: 1) Recall your first politically-sentient moment.   2) Tell a little about your research at KU in language even a liberal arts major who took his last formal science course 26 years ago (that would be me) can follow.  I ain't too proud to be talked down to.   3) Ginger or Mary Ann?   4) Pick an actual or potential political candidate for any office (local, state or national).  Poof!  You've been asked…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 210 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: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

In the End, Sometimes Giving Things Up *IS* the Answer

About five years ago a colleague of mine, Dale Allen Pfeiffer wrote an essay I can no longer locate.  At the time, Colony Collapse Disorder was just being diagnosed in bees, and one of the discussed potential causes of the problem was cell phones and cell phone towers.  Pfeiffer didn't, as I remember, take a stand on this question as a cause, but what he did do was interview people and ask "If it was true that cell phones caused CCD, and knowing that we depend on bees for a large portion of our food, would you give up your cell phone to save the bees?" The answer, overwhelmingly, was no. Now…

When Scientists Misrepresent Science

There is an anti-evolution article on Tech Central Station that is just begging for a response, and I'd certainly hate to disappoint. The article is written by Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama. Up front, it is important to note that one should not be fooled by his credentials. He calls himself only a "PhD scientist", and indeed that is precisely what he is. But his area of specialty, climatology, is entirely unrelated to evolution. Thus, the fact that he has a PhD means virtually nothing. He has no more training in fields relevant to evolution - biology, paleontology, anthropology,…

No, it is not okay to give patients a treatment with no proved medical benefits

Et tu, Scientific American? A few of you seem to know what will catch my attention and push my buttons, because over the past couple of days a few of you sent me an article published in Scientific America by an internal medicine resident named Allison Bond entitled Sometimes It's Okay to Give Patients a Treatment with No Proved Medical Benefits. Yes, a title like that is akin to waving the proverbial cape in front of a bull. Of course, I doubt that Bond herself came up with that title; editors usually come up with such titles. Still, the title is a fairly accurate summation of what is being…

Comments of the Week #81: From photons and time to long-lost asteroids

"The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too." -Stephen Covey It's been a really eventful week, with topics from the fundamental to the cosmic all under scrutiny here at Starts With A Bang, plus an extremely controversial (and response-producing) story on the topic of Geoff Marcy, harassment and his eventual resignation. In case you missed anything: How do photons experience time? (for Ask Ethan), The NFL story you don't hear (for…

Wingnuts against Harry Potter--again

It seems to be the time of the year for this sort of thing. Yes, I realize that the Harry Potter novels have come under attack from various fundamentalist Christians, who view them as somehow indoctrinating children into witchcraft, Wicca, demon worship, or whatever. I also realize that I may be a bit behind the times on this story. But, with Halloween coming up and all, I thought I'd mention it anyway, because this time one such parent, Laura Mallory, has taken her beef with Harry Potter all the way to her state Board of Education in Georgia, after having been slapped down before in her…

Friday Fun: Comments and chronology on The Great Sonny Rollins Jazz Satire Blowup of 2014

Is jazz satire possible? Can it possibly be funny or even relevant? This question is more immediate and pressing that you would normally imagine in the wake of serial controversies in the jazz world. It all began at the end of July when The New Yorker posted a article in their humour column by Django Gold purporting to be the thoughts of jazz legend Sonny Rollins where he basically says jazz is a waste of time and they his whole life has been in vein. The jazz world exploded as it was not immediately obvious that it was satire. If it had been in The Onion people might have realized it…

Michael Skube: just another guy with a blog and an Exhibit A for why bloggers are mad at Corporate Media

Here are a few pertinent quotes, but read the entire articles as well as long comment threads. Ed Cone: Skube published an opinion piece about blogs that, with the help of his editors at the LA Times, failed to uphold the journalistic standards he preaches. It's not the first time that Skube has opined out of ignorance on this subject. I called the Pulitzer winner's previous column for the N&R a "virtually content-free rant, citing no blogs, showing no signs he did any research by reading blogs...crap." Then I phoned Skube and found he had said little because he knew little and cared…

Here we go again: The vile tactic of blaming shaken baby syndrome on vaccines, part 3

Whenever I discuss the concept of being "antivaccine" and how almost nobody wants to have the label "antivaccine" applied ot her, it's not uncommon that I hear the whinging retort from antivaccinationists claiming that "I'm not antivaccine; I'm pro-vaccine safety," or some similar claim. Of course, whenever I see antivaccinationists likening vaccination to the Holocaust (and themselves to Jews wearing the Yellow Star of David), rape, and felonious assault, I realize that denials tend merely to help antivaccinationists convince themselves that they don't stand for something that society…

You haven't walked in my shoes!

At the risk of muscling in on Bronze Dog's territory, I've encountered a phenomenon that ought to be in his list of doggerel but doesn't appear to be. It appeared in the comments of my post about the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate and my discussion of how the human tendency to see patterns where none really exist, coupled with the emotional investment the parents of autistic children have in their children and fueled by unscrupulous purveyors of harmful woo like Mark and David Geier, manages to keep the myth that mercury in vaccines is responsible for the "epidemic" of autism alive. My point…

What Do I, As A Blogger, Want From A Network?

There's been lots of talk lately about the future of science blogging, in general, and the purpose and nature of blogging communities or networks, more specifically. If you haven't read Bora's post, you should. Even if you aren't specifically interested in SCIENCE blogging, as it relates to new media in general. From the outset I will state that I still am unsure about my future at scienceblogs. When I do make a decision, it will be carefully considered, and I will be confident in my decision. I have not been around long enough to feel fed-up with things here. Though I can also see that those…

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media, year end edition

Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I've noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I'm not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having started my new job yet, I…

(Non) Adaptive Function of Sleep

From November 01, 2005, a review of a review... Here is a nice article in Washington Post - Ecological Niche May Dictate Sleep Habits - about the adaptive function of sleep. It addresses some of the themes I am interested in. First, the unfortunate fact is that sleep was initially defined by researchers of humans, i.e., medical researchers. Inevitably, the (electrophysiological) definition of sleep was thus saddled with unneccessary anthropocentric elements that for decades hampered the study of evolution of sleep. I was present at the meeting (here in Biotechnology Center in RTP) several…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Katherine Haxton

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 Katherine Haxton of the Endless Possibilities blog (see the archives of her Nature Network blog here), 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? Hello! I'm Katherine and I'm a chemist.…

(Non) Adaptive Function of Sleep

From November 01, 2005, a review of a review... Here is a nice article in Washington Post - Ecological Niche May Dictate Sleep Habits - about the adaptive function of sleep. It addresses some of the themes I am interested in. First, the unfortunate fact is that sleep was initially defined by researchers of humans, i.e., medical researchers. Inevitably, the (electrophysiological) definition of sleep was thus saddled with unneccessary anthropocentric elements that for decades hampered the study of evolution of sleep. I was present at the meeting (here in Biotechnology Center in RTP) several…

Hurricanes, healthcare, and elections

Things are mostly back to normal in DC today: Schools and government offices are open, trains and buses are running on their usual schedules, and there are few outward signs that Hurricane (or Superstorm) Sandy passed through here less than 48 hours ago. The situation is apparently far worse in New York and New Jersey, where flooding damaged millions of homes and hundreds of miles of subway tunnels. Millions of people from the Carolinas to Maine lost power, and many are still without it. The US death toll has reached 40. With Election Day less than a week away, Hurricane Sandy reminds us how…

Learning What the Best College Teachers Do

Photo source. This article was co-authored with Ms. Julie Dalley, Program Coordinator for the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair State University. Why pursue a college degree? It is a fair question. People pursue a college degree for many different reasons. It may be the realization of a personal goal, have cultural significance, or may simply be a stepping-stone to professional success. No matter what the motivation, all students have an expectation of learning and many pay a high price to achieve their learning goals. But is learning taking place? And if so, how?…

Chiropractic and antivax: Two quacky tastes that taste quacky together

Chiropractic is supposed to be the "respectable" face of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). At least, that's what chiropractors want you to think. After all, chiropractors are licensed in all 50 states and thus their specialty has the imprimatur of the state to make it appear legitimate. Unfortunately, chiropractors are, as I have said so many times before, physical therapists with delusions of grandeur—and poorly trained as physical therapists at that. They just can't restrict themselves to the musculoskeletal system and can't resist pontificating about and treating systemic…

Is Bioterrorism the Most Terrifying Public Health Problem? [The ScienceBlogs Book Club]

Mark Pendergrast writes: Instead of responding to last week's commentaries on this book club blog about my book, Inside the Outbreaks, I want to throw out a controversial idea that runs counter to what many public health commentators apparently believe. So I expect some disagreement here. (I will post responses to the commentaries as "comments" on each commentary. So go back and take a look at what I wrote there, please.) Fears of bioterrorism are overblown. We should be spending much more money, time, effort, and print (including e-print) on naturally occurring outbreaks, epidemics,…

Antibiotic resistance: myths and misunderstandings

A pig flying at the Minnesota state fair. Picture by TCS. I've been involved in a few discussions of late on science-based sites around yon web on antibiotic resistance and agriculture--specifically, the campaign to get fast food giant Subway to stop using meat raised on antibiotics, and a graphic by CommonGround using Animal Health Institute data, suggesting that agricultural animals aren't an important source of resistant bacteria. Discussing these topics has shown me there's a lot of misunderstanding of issues in antibiotic resistance, even among those who consider themselves pretty…

Is Bioterrorism the Most Terrifying Public Health Problem?

Mark Pendergrast writes: Instead of responding to last week's commentaries on this book club blog about my book, Inside the Outbreaks, I want to throw out a controversial idea that runs counter to what many public health commentators apparently believe. So I expect some disagreement here. (I will post responses to the commentaries as "comments" on each commentary. So go back and take a look at what I wrote there, please.) Fears of bioterrorism are overblown. We should be spending much more money, time, effort, and print (including e-print) on naturally occurring outbreaks, epidemics,…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Thanks, Paulette Williams! Thanks for the Kangen water woo!

After nearly six years subjecting the world to my meandering and often incredibly verbose stylings, I'm now what you would call an established blogger. Even more than that, I'm a reasonably high traffic blogger, at least in the medical blogosphere. What that means is that I get a lot of e-mail. A lot. While I do look at each and every e-mail that finds its way into the in box of one of my accounts, there's no way I can respond to them all. In order to save time, I look for shortcuts, and one of those shortcuts is not to devote more than a second or two to e-mails that are obvious sales…

A bit of antivaccine misinformation from the left and the right

Thanks, Daily Kos. Well, not really. You'll see why in a minute, but first here's the background. There's a general impression out there that the political right is associated with the antiscience that includes anthropogenic global warming denialism, denial of evolution, and denial of aspects of reproductive biology that don't jibe with their religious beliefs, and that consensus while the political left's brand of antiscience includes antivaccine beliefs and fear mongering about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Of course, as I've discussed many times before, it's more complicated than…

The American Medical Student Association and its promotion of woo in medical school

There's a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won't die out until the current generation of established physicians retire and are replaced by the new generation coming up through medical schools. From my perspective, it's a bit of an exaggeration, because in the mere 13 years that I've been a real doctor (i.e., an attending…

Our pharma overlords will be displeased...

There's an oft-quoted saying that's become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that's been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn't. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine. Of course, being the kind of guy that I am, I have to make it a bit more complicated than that while driving home in essence the same message. In my hands, the way this argument goes is that the whole concept of "alternative"…

Modes of Operation in Block Cryptography

Sorry for the slow pace of the blog lately. I've been sick with a horrible sinus infection for the last month, and I've also been particularly busy with work, which have left me with neither the time nor the energy to do the research necessary to put together a decent blog post. After seeing an ENT a couple of days ago, I'm on a batch of new antibiotics plus some steroids, and together, those should knock the infection out. With that out of the way: we're going to look at how to get from simple block ciphers to stream ciphers, using the oh-so-imaginatively named modes of operation! As a…

Here we go again — I get more email

Some online news organization has revivified the Cincinnati Zoo/Creation "museum" controversy, and they have blamed me for it all. Thank you, thank you, I appreciate the credit, but really, it must be shared with the thousands of people who responded with their letters, and particularly with the zoo administrators, who so quickly saw the folly of forming an affiliation with an anti-science/anti-education organization like Answers in Genesis. However, Mark Looy of the Creation "museum" generously credited me by name as the ringlea…um, criminal mastermi…uh, instigator of the campaign to…

Birds in the News 138

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Canyon Towhee, Pipilo fuscus, in Chaco Canyon. Image: Dave Rintoul, June 2008 [larger view]. News of Birds in Science According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution from offshore oil operations and shipping. Dee Boersma, professor of biology and the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, reports that Patagonian (magellanic) penguins,…