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Comments of the Week #123: from expanding space to the age of the Universe

 “Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can’t handle!” -Sanya Richards-Ross It’s been another big week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories covering the Universe near and far. I myself was on vacation, but thanks to our generous Patreon supporters, I was able to put in the resources to get a week ahead and have a whole slew of stories to publish from afar. If you missed anything this week, go back and check it all out now (especially since I know some of you don't read the full stories) so that you don't miss out: How small can a piece of the Universe be and still expand? (for…

Are one person's iconoclastic views another person's denialism?

I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this…

The Ethics of The Quote

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion on Twitter with @jason_pontin (and a couple of others chimed in, e.g., @TomLevenson and @scootsmoon) about the role of quotes in journalism. Specifically, about the importance of providing a brief quote from sources interviewed for a piece. The difference in mindsets of Old vs. New journalism appeared in sharp relief. I did not really think hard about this question until now, so this post is just my first provisional stream-of-thought about this and I welcome discussion in the comments. So, let me try a mental experiment here. You are a journalist.…

The Future is Here and it is Bright: Interview with Anne-Marie Hodge

I discovered Pondering Pikaia less than a year ago and it has immediately become one of my favourite daily reads. Thus, I was very happy that Anne-Marie Hodge could come to the Science Blogging Conference last month so she could meet with all the other science bloggers in person. 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 background? What is your Real Life job? Thanks, Bora, I feel really honored to be an interviewee! Let's see, who am I...I grew up in a military family, so I moved around quite a bit…

Birds in the News 118 -- White-crested Elaenia Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter The White-crested Elaenia, Elaenia albiceps, on Texas' South Padre Island. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Erik Breden, who retains the copyright to the image [larger view and More pictures of this bird]. [call notes of this bird, linked from Martin Reid, who recorded it onsite (mp3)]. The really hot bird news in the United States is the presence of a White-crested Elaenia on Texas' South Padre Island. This is the first time this species has been seen in North America, so there are…

The anti-vaccine movement: Is it too late for scientists to bridge the gap between evidence and fear?

Hot on the heels of yesterday's paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it's an interview with a professor of medical anthropology at UCSF named Sharon Kaufman, who took a 26 month hiatus from her usual work on aging and longevity to study the anti-vaccine movement from an anthropological perspective. Her observations in some way echo observations I've been making as a…

How "evidence-based" is evidence-based medicine?

Sadly (with regards to vacation) and not-so-sadly (with regards to the events of last week), it's time to dive headlong back into the "real world" at work, starting with clinic today. It also means it's time to get back to my favorite hobby (blogging) in a much more regular way, although I will say that a relatively prolonged break from the blog was good, and my traffic only suffered mildly for it. I may have to do it more often, if only to keep things fresher. One of the tasks that confronted me this weekend as I got ready to face a full week back at work was to try to catch up on all the…

The CDC "whistleblower" manufactroversy: Twitter parties and another "bombshell" e-mail

Remember yesterday how, I referenced the ever-awesome bit about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and how after pulling the pin you must count to three, no more, no less, before lobbing the grenade at thine enemies? The implication was, of course, that I was on my third post in a row about the so-called “CDC whistleblower” and that was enough. I lied. Well, no, actually I didn’t lie. (But look for a crank to quote mine that two-word sentence.) Rather, I changed my mind. The reasons are three-fold. First, this is a crank storm that just keeps on giving when it…

ID Arguments from Creationist Sources

Over at Dembski's Home for Wayward Sycophants, crandaddy has made a rather curious claim that provides an excellent pretext for analyzing further the links between ID and creationism while simultaneously providing a case study in the ability of ID advocates to ignore evidence that they wish didn't exist. He is responding to the praise of Barbara Forrest from Pat Hayes and myself, and this is his argument: Now, here's what I don't understand. Forrest has a PhD in philosophy from Tulane, yet the best ID=Creationism arguments she seems to be able to put forth are either red herrings (The…

For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!

We all know Twitter can be annoying, but is it really evil? During the past week, you may have heard that there is brand-new neuroscientific evidence proving exactly that. But the hype turns out to be just that: hype. It all started with a press release from USC about an upcoming PNAS paper by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, entitled "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion." The USC press release, which was picked up by EurekAlert and other outlets, says: The finding, contained in one of the first brain studies of inspirational emotions in a field dominated by a focus…

A victory in the long war against autism quackery

As depressing as the litany of quackery and patient harm that I follow nearly every day can become, occasionally I am heartened to learn of a victory for science-based medicine and, more importantly, for the patients being victimized by pseudoscientific treatments. One of the most simultaneously ridiculous and vile of these treatments is a solution known as the "Miracle Mineral Solution" or "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (MMS). MMS is the "discovery" of a man named Jim Humble who, for reasons only understood by antivaccinationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, quacks, and cranks, decided that ingesting…

Dystonia from a flu vaccine? Almost certainly not.

Several of my readers have been writing in with links and stories about the case of Desiree Jennings, a 28-year-old cheerleader who was apparently healthy until sometime in August, when she received the seasonal flu vaccine. A typical news story on Jennings can be seen here: I'm not a neurologist, which made me reluctant to take this on, but right from the beginning something didn't seem right. I had never heard of a case of dystonia that looked anything like the above, particularly the part where walking backwards reversed (if you'll excuse my word choice) her jerky motions or where she…

NYU holds a conference on resistance to vaccines. Antivaxers lose it.

One of the great things about America has been the First Amendment, particularly the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. These are rights allow us to gather together to protest when we see something that we don’t think is right and want to change. Unfortunately, there is one downside to these freedoms, and that is that cranks, quacks, and outright twits have just as much right to free speech as anyone. Fortunately, my right to free speech allows me to ridicule these twits for annoying people, endangering public health, and in general making publicly making idiots of themselves…

Acupuncture: Getting the point

I’ve frequently written about what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of outright quackery into medical academia, particularly medical schools and academic medical centers. There’s no doubt that it’s a significant problem as hallowed institutions like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center embrace nonsense, pseudoscience, and quackery in the name of “integrative medicine.” It goes far beyond MSKCC, however, with Dana-Farber and other elite institutions having apparently bought into the need to study prescientific vitalistic quackery. One area that’s…

Imagining the Post-Industrial Economy

Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing - what will the economy look as we go? I get more questions about this than about anything else - what should people do for work, what should they do with savings, how should they begin to prepare themselves for a lower energy world. What I find, however, is that among both the prepared and the unprepared, there's a whole lot of people kidding themselves. There are those who imagine that there is no economy outside the world of the stock market and formal jobs - that a crash…

A Falsehood: The poor and the dark skinned have more babies than the rich and the light skinned

Good morning and welcome to another installment of "The Falsehoods." Today's falsehood is the assertion that the poor have more babies than the rich, or that the poor just have more babies to begin with. In comparison to ... whatever. Now, before you rush off to the Internet and find some table or graph that shows higher fertility in women of lower SES than higher SES, or a high birth rate among Nigerians, I want to acknowledge right away that such evidence is easy to find, and it is easy to take that evidence and construct the obnoxious sentence that titles this post. Yes, that is all…

The "Health Ranger" Mike Adams takes on Obamacare with hilarious results

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not really a political blogger. True, I do from time to time succumb to the blogger's temptation of being a pundit on current events or pontificating on politics, but in general I don't do that very often because political bloggers are a dime a dozen and politics isn't my area of strength. Writing about science and science-based medicine is. That's part of the reason why I really haven't said much about the massive health care reform bill that was passed on Sunday or the political process, except when on occasion the utter insanity of it all (…

Antivaccinationists brief Congressional staffers, and the misinformation flows

The other day, I pointed out that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was following in the footsteps of the former chair of the committee, likely the quackiest, most antivaccine Congressman who ever served in the House of Representatives. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). I guess that since Burton retired at the end of the last Congress, someone has to step up to the plate when it comes to pushing the antivaccine agenda. Issa is doing that by holding a hearing a year ago on "autism" that was in reality a thinly disguised excuse to castigate…

Quackademic medicine invades the military again

As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It's an area that you wouldn't necessarily expect, although anyone who's read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I'm referring to the military, and, as I've documented time and time again, increasingly our men and women in uniform are being subjected to abject quackery. What they need and deserve is the very best science-based medicine that we as a nation have to offer. Instead, what more and more of…

Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective, the book

As you'll know if you have your fingers on the throbbing pulse of dinosaur-related publications, the massive, incredibly pricey volume published by the Geological Society of London, and resulting from the 2008 meeting History of Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Saurians, now exists in dead-tree form. It's titled Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective and (in my totally unbiased opinion) is a definite must-see* for anyone interested in the historical side of Mesozoic reptile research. Here are thoughts and comments on some of the contents. * I initially wrote 'must have',…

Book review: Unscientific America.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum Basic Books 2009 In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's…

House Votes to Scrap Prevention & Public Health Fund

At her Washington Post blog 2chambers, Felicia Sonmez reports that the House has passed legislation repealing the section of the Affordable Care Act that created the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which gives the Department of Health and Human Services $15 billion over the next 10 years to fund prevention and public health. The Republican complaint? Sonmez reports, "Republicans have criticized the account as a "slush fund" that gives Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wide latitude in administering federal money without congressional oversight." This is an odd critique…

Another Week of GW News, January 15, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Another Week of Climate Disruption News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomJanuary 15, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, Horn of Africa, Doomsday Clock, India, 2 Minute Hates, Cohen et al. Tzedakis et al., Oliver, Northern Gateway, Bottom Line, Hype, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food…

Another week of GW News, November 21, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Another week of Climate Instability News Information Overload is Pattern RecognitionNovember 21, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, GGCS, Kiribati, CSRRT, AGU, Pakistan Carbon Tariffs, IEC, EcoCops, Psych, Winter Weather, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-corps, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate…

Toadtastic - the invasion begins!

I forget how it started now, but lately I've been very, very interested in toads (yes, toads), so much so that I've felt compelled to write about them. The problem is that toads - properly called bufonids - are not a small group. On the contrary, this is a huge clade, distributed worldwide and containing about 540 species in about 38 genera (as of October 2009). So, there are a lot of species to write about, and covering all or most of them is quite the challenge. But it's the sort of challenge I like... As is so often the case with amphibian and reptile groups, accessible literature that…

Birds in the News 134

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Male prothonotary warbler, Protonotaria citrea in breeding plumage. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [OMG view]. Birds in Science New research led by Dr Melanie Massaro and Dr Jim Briskie at the University of Canterbury, which found that the New Zealand bellbird is capable of changing its nesting behaviour to protect itself from predators, could be good news for island birds around the world at risk of extinction. The introduction of predatory mammals such as rats, cats and stoats to oceanic islands has led to the extinction…

Naturopaths cynically use the murder of a quack to promote naturopathic licensure

Naturopathy is a frequent topic on this blog because it is a veritable cornucopia of quackery, in which not pseudoscience is too out there. Homeopathy, functional medicine, bogus diagnostic tests, traditional Chinese medicine, reflexology, naturopaths embrace it all, and more. More importantly, thanks to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), known more recently as "integrative medicine," naturopathy is becoming more and more "respectable." Indeed, there are naturopaths at far too many academic medical centers. One even participated in the writing of the Society for Integrative…

The American Academy of Pediatrics gets hard core on vaccine exemptions—finally

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been approximately 16 years since I first discovered that there was such a thing as antivaccinationists. Think of it this way. I was around 37 or so when, while wandering around Usenet (remember Usenet?), I found the newsgroup misc.health.alternative (or m.h.a. for short), a discussion group about, appropriately enough, alternative medicine. It was there that I first encountered the claim that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, autoimmune diseases, and a panoply of just about every chronic disease known to humankind. Much like when I had…

A neurological mechanism for Fragile-X disease

I'm busy preparing my lecture for genetics this morning, in which I'm going to be talking about some chromosomal disorders … and I noticed that this summary of Fragile-X syndrome that was on the old site hadn't made it over here yet. A lot of the science stuff here actually gets used in my lectures, so they represent a kind of scattered online notes, so I figured I'd better put this one where I can find it. I haven't even finished grading the last of the developmental biology papers, and already my brain is swiveling towards the genetics literature, as I get in the right frame of mind to…

Patterning the nervous system with Bmp

I'm a little surprised at the convergence of interest in this news report of a conserved mechanism of organizing the nervous system—I've gotten a half-dozen requests to explain what it all means. Is there a rising consciousness about evo-devo issues? What's caused the sudden focus on this one paper? It doesn't really matter, I suppose. It's an interesting observation about how both arthropods and vertebrates seem to partition regions along the dorso-ventral axis of the nervous system using exactly the same set of molecules, a remarkable degree of similarity that supports the idea of a common…

Richard Younger-Ross MP (LibDem) on the Digital Economy Bill

Given that the much-reviled Digital Economy Bill has been forced through Parliament into law, I thought I'd share the very long and very thoughtful email I received from my MP Richard Younger-Ross after I wrote to him in protest of some measures included in this proposed legislation (particularly odious is making the account-holder responsible for whatever allegedly happens through their connection, a plan that will likely wipe out wifi sharing in this country). Ross doesn't seem to have turned up to vote on the bill, but I don't hold much of a grudge against him for that: scheduling a vote…

Do you believe in magic in medicine?

Sometimes, between blogging, a demanding day (and night) job doing surgery and science, and everything else, I embarrass myself. Sure, sometimes I embarrass myself by saying something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't. More often, I embarrass myself by letting things slide that I shouldn't. For instance, when friends send me a prepublication copy of their books, I should damned well read them, don't you think? So it was that Paul Offit sent me a copy of his latest book, which just hit the bookstores and online outlets this week, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of…

When alternative medicine cancer cures fail, it's always the patient's fault. Always.

After a trilogy of posts on the lamentably bad decision on the part of the Tribeca Film Festival to screen a pseudoscience- and misinformation-filled documentary by hero to the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, that is basically one long conspiracy theory, I thought it was time for a change. I had briefly toyed with the idea of having some fun with the flying monkeys (a.k.a. antivaccine commenters) who've descended upon the Tribeca Film Festival entry for the documentary, but, as of this writing, the total number of comments is over 1,700 and it wouldn't surprise me if it were over 2,…

Alternative medicine: Deadly for cancer patients

Alternative medicine, by definition, consists of medicine that either has not been shown to work or has been shown not to work. To paraphrase an old adage yet again, medicine that has been shown to work with an acceptable risk-benefit ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply "medicine." Unlike the case for many conditions commonly treated with alternative medicine, whether or not a treatment works against cancer is determined by its impact on the hardest of "hard" endpoints: Survival. A patient either survives his cancer or he does not. Even the "softer" endpoints used to assess the…

Jumping on the "omics" Bandwagon

Sandra Porter is having fun collecting all the new-fangled biological subdisciplines that end with "-omics". The final product of each such project also has a name, ending with "-ome". You have all heard of the Genome (complete sequence of all the DNA of an organism) and the Genomics (the effort to obtain such a sequence), but there are many more, just look at this exhaustive list! In my written prelims back in 1999, I suggested that sooner or later there will be an organismome...until someone whispers that the term "physiology" already exists. There are a couple of things that strike me…

Buffy and C.S.I in the Writing Lab: Interview with Jennifer Ouelette

Jennifer Ouelette runs the delightful blog Cocktail Party Physics . She has published two popular science books: The Physics of the Buffyverse and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats and was the Very Special Blogging Star Speaker at the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. 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 background? What is your Real Life job? I'm Jennifer Ouellette, a self-employed science writer specializing in physics and associated topics, although my interests veer into other scientific…

Finding Solutions for Terrorism

Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor who put Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in prison for the original WTC bombing in 1993, has a fascinating article at the National Review Online. He begins by debunking the notion of the "war on terrorism": Terrorism is not an enemy. It is a method. It is the most sinister, brutal, inhumane method of our age. But it is nonetheless just that: a method. You cannot, and you do not, make war on a method. War is made on an identified and identifiable enemy. In the here and now, that enemy is militant Islam a very particular practice and interpretation of a very particular…

Racist Columnist Rails Against Blacks, Whites, Asians

File this under "How in the Hell......" No one would be foolish enough to claim that racism and discrimination doesn't exist to some extent. Its an unhappy result of worlds and societies colliding, and I truly believe that as societies evolve, the issue improves. Thats why when someone exhibits blatant, angry racism in a public forum like an op-ed newspaper piece, its like taking giant steps backwards. Such is the case of Asian-American columnist Kenneth Eng who writes for AsianWeek, a, asian-interest paper for San Francisco area residents. Mr. Eng's running column, entitled "God of the…

Another Week of GW News, February 5, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionFebruary 5, 2012 Chuckles, COP17, Horn of Africa, RPRP, Miller, Lenton, Europe WSJ-16, Intimidation, Rodentia, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Orca, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…

"I want those workers to be as safe as those shrimp" - What we still don't know about Deepwater Horizon response health impacts

by Elizabeth Grossman "I want this seafood to be safe. But I want those workers to be as safe as those shrimp and I'm not just going for funny one-liner," said Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the conclusion of the July 15th Senate Appropriations Committee's Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee hearing on the use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf. "One might say, 'Well, what's Commerce-Justice doing with public health?'" Mikulski asked rhetorically. "Well, we think [about] water quality, the impact on marine life and seafood and what these dispersants mean to…

Health disparities research and the mainstreaming of "integrative medicine"

The overarching goal that proponents of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as is becoming the preferred term, "integrative" medicine is the mainstreaming of the "unconventional" treatments that fall under the rubric of these two terms. Indeed, that's the very reason why they so insisted on the shift from calling it CAM to calling it "integrative medicine." Not being content with the subsidiary status as not quite "real" medicine" that the words "complementary" and "alternative" imply, they want their woo to be seen as full co-equals with scientific medicine, hence…

Homeopathy as "nanopharmacology"? The only thing "nano" is the quantity of the science involved

It would appear that during my mini-hiatus (indeed, a homeopathic hiatus, so to speak) to celebrate having passed the fifth anniversary of the start of this blog and being irritated by some of my colleagues enough to risk getting myself in a little trouble, I actually missed something that normally I'd leap on like a starving hyena. Normally, such woo would have been like waving the proverbial red cape in front of the bull, holding a slab or bloody red steak in front of a starving pit bull, or a rabbit zipping in front of my late lamented dog. The not-so-Respectful Insolence would have been…

Another preventable death thanks to alternative medicine

What is it about Florida and quacks? It’s as though it’s the Wild West there when it comes to regulating the practice of medicine. There, quacks can get away with almost anything, or so it would seem. After all, Brian Clement, who isn’t even a doctor and isn’t even really a naturopath either, has been practicing his quackery for decades, even going so far as to travel to Ontario to look for new marks among the indigenous peoples and to Europe and the UK, leading to at least one preventable death and to a young mother with incurable breast cancer to waste her precious remaining time and effort…

And yet another political roundup...

The Power of Political Misinformation: As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation. But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information. Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics: What's interesting about…

Birds in the News 81 (v3n8)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Burrowing owls, Athene cunicularia. The photographer writes; While driving up to Colorado, I spotted a pair of Burrowing Owls trying in vain to stay dry in the drizzle. Highway 385 North of Brownfield, Terry County, TX. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Jay Packer. Birds in Science Gone are the days when animals were classified to taxon based solely on bone structure (osteology), body structure (morphometrics) or behavior (ethology), or some combination of these characters. Currently,…

FDA warns Lenny Horowitz

My bestest buddy on planet Earth, HIV Denier and snake-oil peddler Lenny Horowitz, finally caught the attention of the FDA for the crap he is selling on his websites (full warning letter below the fold): May 11, 2010 OVERNIGHT MAIL RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED In reply refer to Warning Letter SEA 10-22 Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz Healthy World Distributing, LLC 206 North 4th Avenue, Suite #147 Sandpoint, Idaho 83864 Jacqueline G. LindenBach Mary Johnson Healing Celebrations, LLC 217 Cedar Street, #326 Sandpoint, Idaho 83864 WARNING LETTER Dear Dr. Horowitz, Ms. LindenBach and Ms. Johnson: This is to…

Long-eared bats proper: Plecotus and other plecotins (vesper bats part VI)

Yay, more vesper bats! The groups we've looked at so far have - in anatomical terms - been pretty conservative. This time round we're looking at a really remarkable group; as is so often the case, their familiarity (relative to so many others of the world's bats) means that we tend to forget or ignore how remarkable they are. Ordinarily, you might balk at the idea of a mammal whose ears are longer than the combined length of its head and body. Yet this is exactly what we have in the long-eared bats (or, in the Plecotus species at least). Yes, welcome to the world of... yeah, long-eared bats…

Another Week of Climate Instability News, September 8, 2013

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 Chronicling a new Age of Consequences September 8, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Guyana, G20, PIF, A Plan, Hiatus, Maldives, Potash Bottom Line, A Change?, Big Banks, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, IP Issues, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather Carbon Cycle,…

Sorry, Denise - but God didn't make numbers

I was planning on ignoring this one, but tons of readers have been writing to me about the latest inanity spouting from the keyboard of Discovery Institute's flunky, Denise O'Leary. Here's what she had to say: Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check unretouched photos.) As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about "superstition" the other day. The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers.…

Mothers Day

Mothers day, and so like all good fathers I went off rowing, only in this case I went Off a little further than normal, since we were competing in the Hammersmith Head. First, however, I did my fatherly duty by assisting Miranda (who woke up especially to remind me that it was mothers day and that she ought to do this) to make M a cup of tea, and to set out her breakfast when she came down, and presenting the paper bouquet carefully. The Ladies (or Girls, or Totty, or Wenches, or Bitches (those latter two not, I think: only Emma and Sarah were kind enough to help us with boating, so got to be…