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Politics and Nonbelief

Blogger R. Joseph Hoffmann recently posted a stunningly idiotic essay lamenting the present state of atheist discourse. It's standard fare for him, this time expressed in especially pretentious and contentless prose. For example, I defy you to discern anything sensible in these two paragraphs: Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus. These people tend to think that there are two kinds of questions: the questions we have already answered and the questions we will answer tomorrow. When they were even smaller than they are now,…

A climate scientist becomes a denialist arguing vaccine pseudoscience

The human mind is amazing in its ability to compartmentalize. Many are the times when I've come across people who seem reasonable in every other way but who cling tightly to one form of pseudoscience or another. On the other hand, as I've noticed time and time again, people whose minds have a proclivity for pseudoscience tend not to limit themselves to just one form of pseudoscience. Indeed, my surgical and skeptical bud Mark Hoofnagle coined a term for this latter phenomenon, namely "crank magnetism." It's basically a pithy term to describe how people who are into one form of pseudoscience…

Diagnosing Dostoyevsky's epilepsy

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is arguably the greatest novelist of all time. He cast a long shadow over world literature, and subsequently influenced many great writers, from Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, to Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jack Kerouac. Dostoyevsky had a profound insight into the human condition. He was much more than a novelist: he was also a psychologist and a philosopher. In his novels, Dostoyevsky explored subjects such as free will, the existence of God, and good and evil. The characters in his novels are most often portrayed as living…

Does anyone "recover" from autism?

Way back in the day, when I was a newbie at countering the mass of hysterical pseudoscience that is the antivaccine movement, particularly the myth that vaccines cause autism, a blogger by the 'nym of Prometheus taught me that autism and autism spectrum disorders (particularly by antivaccinationists and believers in the quackery known as "autism biomed") are conditions of developmental delay, not developmental stasis. Autistic children can and do exhibit improvement in their symptoms simply through growth and development. However, parents who subject their children to "autism biomed" quackery…

Another week of GW News, August 22, 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 Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose...August 22, 2010 Chuckles, COP16+, Geneva, Kathmandu, AAS Report, McShane & Wyner, Zhao & Running The Question, China, Russia, Pakistan, World Bank, Overshoot, Basic Versions, IAC, Post CRU, Montford Melting Arctic, Antarctica Food Crisis, GMOs, Pavlovsk Agricultural Station, Food Production…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 14: Waiting for the other shoe to drop

The experts monitoring and reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster have, for several days now, stopped talking about melting reactor fuel or breached containment vessels. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Energy Collective, and other groups now merely pass along information about pressure and temperature and make a note here and there about water being sprayed on something or not sprayed on something. They have not stopped talking about melting overheated fuel because they have determined that there isn't any. They stopped talking about it because there isn't anything to say…

Birds in the News 60 (v2n11)

Black-throated green warbler, Dendroica virens. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells. Click image for larger view in its own window. Birds in Science Wendy Reed and her research team's study found that male dark-eyed juncos, Junco hyemalis, with extra testosterone were more attractive to females and produced more -- but smaller -- offspring. Smaller offspring had lower survival rates than larger offspring. The extra testosterone also made the male birds sing more sweetly and fly farther. The testosterone-laden birds proved irresistible to older,…

The anti-vaccine "biomed" movement: Hijacking legitimate scientific research

As hard as I find it to believe, the fifth anniversary of this blog is fast approaching. When I started this whole endeavor, it was more or less on a whim that struck me on a cold, dreary, gray Saturday in December, and I had no idea that five years later I'd still be at it, much less that I'd have this many readers. One thing that trying to apply a skeptical and scientific world view to various pseudoscience has allowed me to do, more than just the occasional fit of depression at looking at pseudoscience now, comparing it to pseudoscience then and back in my Usenet days in the late 1990s and…

Happy Birthday Nikola Tesla!

Today is the 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla. Here is an attempt to put in one place as much as can be found about the celebrations of his birthday and birth-year, the information about Tesla, the mentions in the media and on blogs, etc. I will keep updating this post throughout the day so, please, if you know of something I missed, or if you have seen (or written yourself) a blogpost related to Tesla, please let me know by e-mail or in the comments so I can check it out and perhaps include it in this post. Tesla's birthday in the media A good article in Globe and Mail: "Lighting up the…

Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, accurately

Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, accurately By OldCola [Note from pzm: The text of this one is a little rougher than I like, but the content is interesting and addresses the claims of a character who has been lurking about here for a while, and whose work I've criticized before. If nothing else, I'd also like to see a few science posts submitted as guest articles, so think of this as priming the pump.] The article, "Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicistʼs point of view," by V. Fleury, hasn't steered the revolution expected by Fleury in evo-devo. Two years after the publication,…

Joyce Lee Malcolm, quote doctor

Earlier, I wrote how Joyce Lee Malcolm had doctored a quote from the Textbook of Criminal Law to make it appear that self-defence was illegal in Britain. She wrote: Now everything turns on what seems to be "reasonable" force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law." The word "it" does not refer to self-defence as Malcolm's addition to the quote indicates, but to…

ConvergeSouth05 - Blogging from the outside

This sessions tried, once again, to answer the old question "Where are the female political bloggers?" Continuing the ConvergeSouth coverage.... Friday late morning: This was probably the most exciting session of all. Tiffany of Blackfeminist blog was going to discuss the problem of an emerging hierarchy within the blogosphere. All the so-called "A-listers" are middle-class, middle-age, white, straight, and usually Christian, men. Every three months or so, one of them looks around and posts a question "Where are all the female political bloggers?". What inevitably ensues is a big fight in…

Climate Trolls - An Illustrated Bestiary

As you travel the inter-tubes in search of learned discourse, understanding and information to prepare you for the coming climate cataclysms, you will see many curious creatures, some common, some rare, who are here for the sole purpose of deterring, deceiving and confusing you.  Some will pray on your admitted ignorance or uncertainty.  Some will pray on your subconscious wish that climate change not be real or if it is, it will be benign. Some will seem to engage sincerely but seek only to lure you so deep into the rabbit hole you will be unable to return. Some will dazzle you with words so…

Joe Mercola: Proof positive that quackery sells

For as many benefits as the Internet and the web have brought us in the last two decades, there are also significant downsides. I could go into all the societal changes brought about by the proliferation of this new technology, not the least of which (to me, at least) is the newfound ability of someone like me to find an audience. After all, pre-Internet and pre-blog, I could try to write books, or I could try to get onto TV and radio, but those are very difficult things to do. Over the last seven years, steadily blogging, I've built up an audience. True, compared to the "old media" and the…

False balance in reporting the case of a local mother jailed for contempt of court for reneging on an agreement to vaccinate her child

I sometimes like to write about things happening in my neck of the woods that are relevant to the kinds of things I normally blog about every day. This habit of mine dates back at least to the days when investigative reporter Steve Wilson of our local ABC affiliate used to lay down fear mongering barrages of nonsense about mercury in vaccines that would have made Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. proud if he ever knew about them. Then there was a report on "orbs" seen in photographs where the reporter speculated whether they were actual spirits. Then there's the periodic fascination with veterinary…

Another Week of GW News, September 9, 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years September 9, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, CAT, Maldives Subsidies, GFIs, Pricing Nature, Cook, Meteorologists Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Speculation, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs,…

Comments of the Week #144: from the Big Bounce to Hubble's Universe

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” -Saint Augustine Well, another week has gone by -- the second of the year -- here at Starts With A Bang! Hopefully, none of you noticed a drop in the quality or frequency of the science I've been bringing you, because I've had the flu, but I've been working hard to make sure you get all the science you've come to expect. And it's been a tremendous week, with…

Thank them - they made ScienceOnline2010 possible

Last week's ScienceOnline2010, our fourth annual science communication conference in North Carolina, was our biggest, best and most successful event yet, and from the long list of blog and media coverage and the Flickr pictures, YouTube videos and Twitter mentions of the conference (all using the tag #scio10), it certainly seems the BlogTogether spirit was coursing through the 267 participants. Anton and I can't be happier, or more proud, of what this conference achieved. More than anything, we are astounded by the openness with which so many people came together to share, explore, question,…

Clear Thinking About Health Care and Money

Google News no longer indexes ScienceBlogs, but they continue to link to drivel like this, from the Wall Street Journal: href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118800560693308626.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">Lone Star Spending Spree By MARY KATHERINE STOUT August 25, 2007; Page A6 Austin, Texas Give George W. Bush credit. He's drawn a lot of criticism for not doing more to control federal spending over the past six years. But he is now deep into a spending fight against a sacred liberal program. And he isn't backing away. In recent weeks, Mr. Bush has confronted Congress over the…

Abe Foxman: Genocide denier?

My regular readers here know to what lengths I go to combat Holocaust denial on the Internet. It's a fairly regular topic on this blog, as is rebutting the lies Holocaust deniers routinely spout. Not surprisingly, Holocaust deniers like to try to portray me as either Jewish or somehow in the thrall of the ADL, much as alternative medicine aficionados like to try to paint me as being a shill for big pharma. (Hey, big pharma and all you Jews out there controlling the New World Order, where are my checks? You guys owe me several years of back payments for my online efforts to undermine the…

Thank them - they made ScienceOnline2010 possible

Last week's ScienceOnline2010, our fourth annual science communication conference in North Carolina, was our biggest, best and most successful event yet, and from the long list of blog and media coverage and the Flickr pictures, YouTube videos and Twitter mentions of the conference (all using the tag #scio10), it certainly seems the BlogTogether spirit was coursing through the 267 participants. Anton and I can't be happier, or more proud, of what this conference achieved. More than anything, we are astounded by the openness with which so many people came together to share, explore, question,…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 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…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 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…

iPads in the Science Classroom: The Bad, The Ugly, and The Good

I know of a couple of cases where high schools are switching to the use of iPads or other tablets, replacing existing computer infrastructure with the handy and very cool computing device. When it comes to technology, I've never been particularly impressed with school administrations, and K-12 technology departments tend to be a little under-resourced as well, so it does not surprise me that this decision is being made. It is, of course, the wrong thing to do. I'm not talking about using iPads, I'm taking about canceling funding for future hardware cycles of laptops and desktops so the…

Your weekend reading on Media and Politics

Too long, thus under the fold - enjoy, think, bookmark for later, use: Netroots push back against MSM 'bias': Criticism from the left can take a variety of forms, including fact-checking, aggregating links and sometimes original reporting. Also, similar to the right's strategy over decades of "working the refs," there are left-leaning bloggers who provide a knee-jerk dismissal of whatever's on the front page of the Times or making the rounds on Sunday chat shows. Hillary Clinton speaks at convention. The press concocts a story: What's so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton…

Quackery so powerful that a famous physicist rolls over in his grave

Orac Note: While Orac is on vacation, he's reprinting some of his "classics" (if you can call them that). He's also trying (but not always succeeding) to pick posts that have never been "rerun" before. (Orac has his favorites, and every few years when he's on vacation he can't resist rerunning them.) In any case, I used to run a feature called "Your Friday Dose of Woo." Basically, it was designed to feature the most spectacularly ridiculous pseudoscience and quackery I could find. It ran for two or three years, pretty much every Friday, until I got tired of being boxed in having to find…

Around the Web: Updated list of posts about the Aaron Swartz story, in chronological order

(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.) A few comments. Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world. How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…

Birds in the News #48

Note: On 4 March, Birds in the News will be one year old! The newest Archaeopteryx fossil. Click image for a slightly larger view in its own window. Birds in Science A mutant chick, called Talpid, that died before hatching 50 years ago, was found to have a full set of crocodile-like chompers, as well as severe limb defects. But because no one ever looked inside the chickâs mouth, its teeth remained undiscovered until recently. Researchers recently created more Talpids by tweaking the genes of normal chickens to grow teeth. "What we discovered were teeth similar to those of crocodiles -- not…

Creationist email to the fraternity

One more piece of creationist email for you: this one was addressed to me and all of my fraternity of Godless Atheists, which I think means you readers here. Never mind protesting that some of you are Christian—get used to it, to these guys you will never be truly Christian. Anyway, it's not a very entertaining letter. It was, as usual, amusingly formatted (Outlook Express is evil software), but I've stripped all that gunky Microsoft html out of it to simplify posting it. It's your usual argument from poorly understood physics: the Big Bang is evidence of Jesus, really tiny numbers prove…

Breast cancer and delays in surgery

Every so often there are studies that I really mean to write about but, for whatever reason, don't manage to get to. Sometimes I get a chance to get back to them. Sometimes I don't. This time around I'm getting back to such a topic. This time around it's a topic I've been meaning to write about is based on a couple of studies that came out three weeks ago that illustrate why, even if a patient ultimately comes around to science-based treatment of his cancer, the delay due to seeking out unscientific treatments can have real consequences.Consider this (probably) the last unfinished bit of…

Regulating the magic that is homeopathy: I have a very bad feeling about the upcoming FDA public hearing

Once again, repeat after me: Homeopathy is quackery. In fact, it's what I like to refer to as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. You would think that, in a modern world and given the incredible advancements in our scientific understanding of biology, physiology, chemistry, and physics over the course of the over 200 years since Samuel Hahnemann pulled the concepts behind homeopathy out of his nether regions, it never ceases to depress me that there are large numbers of people who think that homeopathy could ever work. But they do. A couple of weeks ago, I took notice of a, well, notice from…

In the age of Donald Trump, vaccine policy is becoming politicized, with potentially deadly consequences (revisited)

As I sat down to lay down my daily (or at least week-daily) dose of Insolence last night, my thoughts kept coming back to vaccines. Sure, as I pointed out in yesterday's post, we seemed to have dodged a bullet in that President Trump appears on the verge of appointing someone who is actually competent and pro-vaccine as director of the CDC. Of course, none of that changes the issue that Donald Trump's proposed budget takes a meat axe to public health programs, including vaccines, and that if Republicans succeed in dismantling the Affordable Care Act a large chunk of money going to vaccine…

The failure of the Texas Medical Board: Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski is back in business

When last I wrote about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski nearly two months ago, he had, as I characterized it, just mostly slithered away from justice once again. The Texas Medical Board had not removed his license and had only fined him relatively lightly given his offenses. True, he had conditions placed on his continued practice (more on that later), but it hasn't slowed him down, as you will soon see. Another family is raising funds, this time from the UK, to travel to Houston for his nostrums. Basically, by failing to revoke Stanislaw Burzynski's medical license, the Texas…

Getting Intimate With My Weeds

I plant weeds sometimes. I just feel I should admit this upfront, and come out with it and accept your outrage. You see, my property isn't exactly untouched - it was a sod farm at one point (although most of the actual sod harvesting was done across the road on a field that is not mine), which means that for about decade from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, people poured incredibly toxic chemicals on the ground to keep the grass uniform and then dug up the topsoil and sold it rich people who couldn't wait long enough for grass to grow. Before that it was a dairy farm, cleared as far as the eye…

Today's Adventure in The Land of Medicine

So where have I been all day? In short, I wasted a perfectly good day of internet connectivity so I could go to the hospital -- not as a patient nor as an emergency arrival, although the day was such an abortion that it is surprising that I didn't end up in the psych ER after all was said and done. No, I was there for just one reason: to see my psychiatrist who would then refill my prescription. This is how my day went. 0600: I am awake, listening to NPR. It's dark. My parrot pals are still asleep. 0700: Get up, take a shower, wash my hair, and feed my birds their gourmet meals of fruits,…

Drug safety versus a "Constitutional right" to access to experimental drugs

[Note: There is a followup to this post here.] I've been writing a lot about dichloroacetate (DCA) lately, perhaps even to the point of becoming repetitive and risking boring my readers. Fortunately, this post is not primarily about DCA. Unfortunately, it's about a question that is related to the recent hype over DCA in that it pits the desperation of dying cancer patients who want to try out the latest drugs, even if they haven't been demonstrated to be safe or efficacious, versus the what remaining ability the FDA has to regulate drug safety and, some might argue, the scientific method…

Poor, poor pitiful me: Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Jay Gordon after The Vaccine War

Sometimes, when it comes to the anti-vaccine movement, I feel as though I'm bipolar. There are times when I'm incredibly depressed that pseudoscience and fear mongering are winning out, leaving our children vulnerable to infectious diseases not seen in decades and believing that it's only a matter of time before we start seeing really major outbreaks. This mood tends to strike me when I see actual stories about plummeting vaccination rates and, well, small outbreaks of diseases associated with low vaccination rates and unvaccinated children. There's a condition in surgery known as a "sentinel…

Another Week of GW News, June 14, 2009

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 Another week of Climate Disruption News June 14, 2009 Top Stories: Bonn, USA & China, REDD, Peru, Over 2C, Upcoming G8 Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Gentle Education, Sol, New Measure Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires,…

Mothering: A bastion of woo targeted at young mothers

Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet article suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and a syndrome consisting of regressive autism and enterocolitis. Indeed, Deer even went so far as to describe Wakefield's fraud as "Piltdown medicine,"…

Another week of GW News, March 14, 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 Information overload is pattern recognition March 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16 and Beyond, Paris, Wrong Green, CERA, Outsourcing CO2, World Bank, UN CFG IPCC Review, IPCC Support, CRU Theft, UK Wind, Samanta, Anthony's Question, NASgate Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Svalbard, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate…

Science Denialists Make Fake Journal, Get Shut Down.

Copernicus Publications is an Open Access enterprise that provided the ability for an academic entity of some sort or another to create a new Open Access journal. In March 2013 the journal “Pattern Recognition in Physics" was started up and added to the Copernicus lineup. The journal apparently put out a few items, and then, recently, produced Special Issue 1, called “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts." The special issue editors were Nils-Axel Mörner, R. Tattersall, and J.-E. Solheim. Readers of this blog will recognize R. Tattersall as TallBloke,…

Once again caring more about "parental rights" than the rights of the child being subjected to quackery

When last I wrote about the sad saga of Sarah Hershberger, the 12-year-old Amish girl from northeastern Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, decided to stop her chemotherapy resulting in legal action by Akron children's Hospital to have a medical guardian appointed to make sure that Sarah continues effective science-based therapy of her tumor, I intentionally chose a rather inflammatory title in which I proclaimed that she was coming home to die. I didn't do that lightly. Rather, I did it because I was thoroughly depressed because David Michael, the woo-…

Orac wants you to join the Society for Science-Based Medicine

Because of my involvement in this organization, I am hijacking my own blog for one day for my own nefarious purposes. To that end, I am republishing an announcement that originally appeared yesterday at a blog that a significant fraction of you are familiar with, but nowhere near all of you. And I want all of you to know about this, because I hope that some of you will join our cause. I'm also going to add a few words of my own, because I can't help it. (As Hans Solo once said, "Hey, it's me.") The reason this new organization, the Society for Science-Based Medicine, is so needed is because,…

Sweet and alkaline won't win the war against cancer

I write about cancer quackery a lot, and I've been at it for over a decade. I first cut my teeth on Usenet, delving into that cesspit of unreason known as misc.health. alternative, where my eyes were opened to just the sorts of pseudoscientific and unscientific cancer treatments patients are enticed into trying, sometimes in lieu of effective, science-based therapy. Sometimes, they're lucky enough to get away with it, such cases occurring most commonly when they have undergone effective primary surgery or other therapy for their cancer that eliminated it before the quackery was ever tried.…

Let's get the Presidential candidates to debate science topics

Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney have been promising something for a week, teasing us with tantalizing hints about something big. We were told to read Chris' article Dr.President, and then this morning another article, Science and the Candidates by Lawrence Krauss. Finally, today a little before 2pm EST, we got the idea what it was going to be and at 2, they posted their Call for a Presidential Science Debate on their blog, as well as invited everyone to the brand new Facebook group of the same title. They have started an initiative to organize a debate for the U.S Presidential candidates…

Elie Wiesel: Carve out an exception to free speech for Holocaust denial

It occurs to me that I haven't written about this topic in quite a while, but a recent event makes me think that maybe now's the time to revisit this topic. I'm referring to Holocaust denial. Newer readers may not know that part of what got me involved in online discussions back in the late 1990s was Holocaust denial. Indeed, a lengthy post about how I discovered Holocaust denial was one of the earliest substantive posts on this blog, popping up a mere month after I started blogging, which just so happened to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. That post…

Another week of GW News, March 20, 2011

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 Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomMarch 20, 2011 Chuckles, Equinox, Fukushima Reactions, Fukushima Talk, Inspiration, WikiLeaks Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, Attribution, Google, Sock Puppetry, Cook Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle,…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 2)

It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 57 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise?: Distance running performance is a viable model of human locomotion. To evaluate the physiologic strain during competitions ranging from 5-100 km, we evaluated heart rate (HR) records of competitive runners (n = 211). We found evidence that: 1) physiologic strain (% of…

Birds in the News 150

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter European Bee-eater pair, Merops apiaster. She's still hungry, but not yet willing to mate. So the male bee-eater takes wing to find more food. When he returns, "the female nearly always accepts the offering, quickly eating," reports British ornithologist C. Hilary Fry. If his courtship is successful, he'll continue to bring her prey through the egg-laying period. Both parents deliver meals to their chicks. Image: Jözsef L. Szentpéteri/National Geographic online [larger view]. Birds in Science Raising young can be…