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Pumping autistic children full of an industrial chelator (revisited again)

As much fun as I had at TAM8, there is one consequence of being out of town and not paying attention to the blog or the Internet as much as I usually do. Well, actually, there are multiple consequences. One is a momentary lapse in insanity. In other words, it's good for the mental health to cut back on the blogging. True, such is the level of my insanity that I didn't just stop altogether for five or six days, as I probably should have, but what can I say? Another consequence is that inevitably one or more things pop up that under normal conditions I'd be going full mental Orac on that…

STEM Books And Toys For Kids: Your Science Holiday Shopping Guide

I've reviewed, researched, and generally looked around for a selection of gifts that could work for kids ranging from very small to High School (and beyond!?!?) that are science oriented. (For gifts, mainly books, for adults, see THIS.) Coding The best kids coding books these days are probably those that use scratch. Before suggesting a couple, though, consider, especailly for older kids (middle and high school) this fairly recent Python language book that focuses on Minecraft: Learn to Program with Minecraft: Transform Your World with the Power of Python HERE is my review. My favorite…

Does the "orchid-dandelion" metaphor work for you? My duel with David Shenk

Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in: Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-dandelion" metaphor I used in my recent Atlantic piece, "Orchid Children" (online version title: "The Science of Success"). Every metaphor has its limits, and David Shenk, a highly capable writer, recognizes that well. Yet he thinks this orchid-dandelion metaphor is fatally flawed, at least as I use it…

The Systematizing Moon and the Empathizing Sun

NoteI get a lot of questions in email about linguistic relativity, or the influence of language on thought. So instead of writing something new, I thought I'd repost two posts I wrote on the topic back on the old blog. Here's the first, originally posted on August 10, 2005. The second will be up tomorrow In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print--I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: "Gretchen.…

The race to flee Andrew Wakefield

What does it take to get an advocate of pseudoscience to change his or her mind? Many are the times I've asked myself that question. Over the years, I've covered the gamut of techniques, going from what some might call "militant" or even insulting to being as reasoned and calm as can be--and probably everywhere in between. It's not just the anti-vaccine movement, either, but the anti-vaccine movement provides a convenient example. This is particularly true because of the recently released revelations, both more detailed old and also new, about how anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield not only…

Yet another bad day for the anti-vaccine movement

Arguably, the genesis of the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement dates back to 1998, when a remarkably incompetent researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a trial lawyer-funded "study" in the Lancet that purported to find a link between "autistic enterocolitis" and measles vaccination with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) trivalent vaccine. In the wake of that publication was born a scare over the MMR that persists to this day, 11 years later. Although peer reviewers forced the actual contents of the paper to be more circumspect, in the press Wakefield promoted the idea that…

Dr. Buttar has a new protocol

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 22, 2005. A couple of months ago, there was a minor dust-up here regarding an unfortunate autistic boy who died…

Credulous reporting on placebo effects strikes again

Let's face it. The vast majority of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM) therapies are nothing more than placebo medicine. This should be so abundantly clear to readers who have followed this blog, Science-Based Medicine, and/or Neurologica Blog more than a few weeks that I shouldn't have to repeat it yet again, but I feel that it bears repeating today as an introduction to today's subject matter. CAM/IM is almost all placebo medicine, and placebos effects are poorly understood (or even misunderstood), even among physicians. It is this misunderstanding…

"Right To Choose Medicine": The free market fundamentalist assault on the FDA continues

Yesterday I discussed a highly unethical clinical trial of a new herpes vaccine, based on what appears to be questionable science but backed by über-Libertarian Peter Thiel. The reason the trial is so unethical is because Rational Vaccines, the company that developed the herpes vaccine and is conducting the clinical trial, not only arranged to carry it out offshore but, unlike all American companies carrying out clinical trials offshore for purposes of gathering data to support an application for FDA approval, Rational Vaccines apparently carried the trial out without any oversight by an…

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space

About a year ago, a month before our wedding, I was walking with my wife (wife-to-be, I guess) and some friends through New York City. It was a hot, sunny summer day, so she was in a sun dress. We walked through parks, we met various friends throughout the city, and generally had a good time. That evening, talking with her mom, she mentioned that she needed to pin the front of her dress, because it showed too much cleavage, and people had been staring at her cleavage whispering crude things to her all day. Folks, I was right there, arm around her waist, pretty much all day. But jackasses…

Antivaxers supported President-Elect Donald Trump. Now they want him to satisfy their demands.

If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to 350,000 votes at the last tally I checked this morning, but now, as in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes is not President-Elect. Hillary…

Comments of the Week #150: From space travel to cosmic superclusters

“I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson, on light pollution As with pretty much every week that goes by, we've had a slew of fantastic stories here at Starts With A Bang! There have also been events galore, including two public talks on gravitational waves and the controversy over the expanding Universe, and many upcoming events, including: March 9th: talks and events at Jacksonville University in FL, March 24-26: appearances and panels at MidSouthCon in Memphis, TN, April…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, October 20, 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 Sipping from the Internet Firehose...October 20, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Alternatives, Post-AR5, ODI, Maldives, Governance Energiewende, Bottom Line, GFIs, Pricing Nature, CookFukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Aerosols, Weather Machine Sensitivity, Clouds, Ozone…

Another Week of GW News - July 1, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis 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 Anthropocene Antics Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionJuly 1, 2012 Chuckles, Post-Rio+20, ATBC, Derecho, Colorado Subsidies, World Bank, Ecocide, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols Paleoclimate…

A player always tells a lady that he loves her

Life is about choices made in the context of scarcity and constraint. In an ideal world (OK, my ideal world) I would be dictator, and all would do my bidding and satisify most proximate desires. Alas, it doesn't work that way. We all have to jump through hoops to get where we want. Whatever our core, or ultimate, values, most people have to compromise to fulfill them. If you are a religious soul for whom God and family are the summum bonum of your existence, well, by the nature of your two ultimate ends you can't go into the cloister or spend all your waking hours with your family. You…

When You Should Not Adapt in Place

Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons - inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place...you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table. Because as little as each of us likes to admit it, it is. There will be many migrations in…

Another Week of GW News, November 18, 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 Planetary Crisis Information Overload is Pattern Recognition November 18, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, IEA-WEO, Post Sandy, Sheffield, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Walrus, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Aerosols,…

Science meets the Mokele-Mbembe!

PLEASE NOTE (ADDED 2012): IT SHOULD BE EXTREMELY OBVIOUS THAT THIS ARTICLE IS AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE, NOT A DESCRIPTION OF REAL RESEARCH. Today sees the publication of what is surely the century's most significant zoological discovery. After decades of searching, Africa's mystery Congolese swamp monster, the Mokele-Mbembe, has been discovered - it is a living sauropod dinosaur, and it radically alters our understanding of archosaur phylogeny, sauropod biology and diversity, and indeed the evolutionary process as a whole. As is fitting for the discovery of a brand new, extant, hitherto…

Picking up one's marbles and going home

One of the greatest gifts anyone can give is to donate his body to science after death. Such anatomic gifts contribute to the training of medical students, residents, and other medical professionals as well as being used for research that can contribute to the advancement of medical science. One of the things that makes an anatomic gift such a profound gift is that the donor usually has little control over what their body or body parts will be used for. There is, thus, more than a little trust in medical science involved in these gifts. When the deceased is a child, the donation of a child's…

What's wrong with Steve Jobs, revisited

It's no secret that, when it comes to computers, my preferred axe has been the Apple Macintosh. Indeed, back in the 1983-1984 school year I was in college living in a house with five other guys, and one of my roommates was a a total Apple geek. He had, as one might expect, an Apple IIe, and I immediately decided that, when it came to computers, I definitely liked the Apple product better than the IBM PC that my other roommate had. Of course, at the time I was nowhere well off enough to be able to afford either, but these two roommates were both computer science majors. They had to have a…

Stem cell tourism: A problem right here in the good ol' USA

Last week, I wrote about a man named Jim Gass, a former chief legal counsel for Sylvania, who had suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009 that left him without the use of his left arm, and weak left leg. He could still walk with a cane, but was understandably desperate to try anything to be able to walk unaided and function more normally in life. Unfortunately (at least given what ultimately happened), Mr. Gass was both driven enough, credulous enough, and wealthy enough to spend $300,000 pursuing stem cell tourism in China, Mexico, and Argentina over the course of four years. The result is…

Another week of GW News, June 24, 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 Anthropocene Antics Sipping from the Internet Firehose...June 24, 2012 Chuckles, Solstice, Rio+20, Rio - NGOs, People's Summit, COP18+, G20, Global Witness Subsidies, Pricing Nature, Global Legal Framework, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Arctic Sanctuary, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Tifton 85, Land…

The Carnival of Evolution #65: Horror Host Edition

I prepared for the Carnival of Evolution late at night over the last several days, bracketing the Halloween holiday, and coupled them with my traditional custom of watching horror movies. It wasn't a good match. The evolutionary stories were far more frightening! Terrifying complexity! psynetresearch Let us consider the mind-blasting madness of dealing with tens of thousands of genes interacting epistatically with one another. The second problem is that while it may in theory be possible to assign fitnesses to individual alleles at individual loci, there are some 25,000 loci in humans,…

Another Week of GW News, March 16, 2008

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) Top Stories:WGMS Report, G20 Meeting, Criminal, Eco:nomics Conference Arctic Conflict, Antarctica, Chinese CO2, Gulf Stream, La Nina Winter, Zero Emissions, Earth Hour Hurricanes, Temperature Record, Sea Levels, ENSO Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Transportation, Buildings, NAFTA CEC Report, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc.…

Another Week of GW News, June 18, 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 Planetary Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJune 17, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, Rio+20 - NGOs, COP18+, BP-SRWE, Fish Kill, Barnosky, 2C Subsidies, Pricing Nature, Global Legal Framework, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Jet Streams, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food…

Another Week of GW News, June 7, 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 Information overload is pattern recognition June 7, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Bonn, UNFCCC Meetings, Ethanol Summit, FAO Meeting, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Open Access, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Nitrogen Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts,…

Back to School Month: Peak Oil 101

Every so often someone comes up to me with fiery eyes and raring for a battle and says "I don't believe in Peak Oil" or "I don't believe in Climate Change." When this happens, I think they expect me to argue with them, and I do. But isn't the argument they expect - my standard response, correct almost 100% of the time is not to make the case for peak oil or climate change, but to argue "Yes, you do, in fact, believe in them." Telling other people what they believe is a chancy business, but I feel reasonably confident in doing so, because when someone says they don't believe in peak oil or…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 280 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…

"Interesting times," thanks to a confluence of anti-vaccine pseudoscience

An old Chinese combined proverb and curse is said to be, "May you live in interesting times." Certainly, with respect to vaccines, the last few years have been "interesting times." Unfortunately, this week times are about to get a lot more "interesting" as the Autism One quackfest descends upon Chicago beginning today. Featuring prominently in this quackfest will be an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park on Wednesday featuring some really bad, anti-vaccine fundamentalist Poe-worthy "music" and a keynote speech by Andrew Wakefield himself. If you want evidence that Andrew Wakefield is being…

Aetogate: so where are we now?

The silence must have been deafening. As - hopefully - everybody knows, during 2007 Spencer Lucas and colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were charged with intellectual theft, of pre-empting the writings of colleagues, and of publishing on material without getting an OK from those based at the repository where the relevant specimens were held (all of this is documented in painstaking detail here). In particular, they apparently pre-empted Bill Parker's in-press paper on a new aetosaur genus, and appeared to take credit for Jeff Martz's re-…

A pharma shill working on behalf of an industry-funded group shows how easy it is to publish propaganda as a legitimate op-ed

As a medical blogger with a skeptical bent and a rather aggressive proclivity towards defending science-based medicine, I generally like STAT News. Sure, it's occasionally screwed up royally (e.g., its credulous false balance reporting on a patient of cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski named Neil Fachon), but in general it's usually a good source of medical news and analysis. No publication is perfect, of course, but STATNews is generally better than average, and I appreciate that. That's why I was disappointed to see how thoroughly a pharma-backed astroturf group whose mission is to loosen…

Another Week of Global Warming News, December 15, 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsDecember 15, 2013 Chuckles, COP19, AGU, WTO, Energiewende Bottom Line, Big Banks, Cook, ShrinkologyFukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Arctic Report Card, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Forecasts, New Weather GHGs, Climate Sensitivity, Clouds, Ozone, ENSO,…

Publishing with a hidden agenda: why birds simply cannot be dinosaurs

A little while ago, news of a new paper by Devon Quick and John Ruben, both of Oregon State University, appeared on the newswires. It got its fair share of publicity. Entitled 'Cardio-pulmonary anatomy in theropod dinosaurs: implications from extant archosaurs', the paper (Quick & Ruben 2009) purports to show that modern birds are fundamentally different from non-avian dinosaurs in terms of abdominal soft-tissue morphology, ergo birds cannot be modified dinosaurs. In slightly more detail, the paper asserts that a specialised 'femoral-thigh complex', combined with a synsacrum and…

Monckton's McLuhan Moment

You know that famous scene in Annie Hall where a bore is going on and on about Marshall McLuhan's work and Allen produces McLuhan who tells the bore that he got McLuhan all wrong? Well, that's kind of what happened in my debate with Monckton. Based on what he had identified as his most important argument in previous talks I was pretty sure he would argue that climate sensitivity was low based on his misunderstanding of Pinker et al Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?. And sure enough, he did. If you read the title of Pinker's paper, you'll see that it's about changes in…

Rethinking the Relevance and Nature of Science Literacy

I spent the past three days with my colleague Ed Maibach and several graduate students conducting one-on-one interviews about climate change with participants recruited and screened from among the diversity of visitors to the National Mall in Washington, DC. In conducting these qualitative interviews--which varied in time between 30 minutes to more than an hour--I was amazed at the forms of localized knowledge and depth of reasoning that participants from different educational backgrounds and with varying political views brought to the topic of climate change. The experience reflected…

Aetogate aftermath: paleontologists discuss the norms of their discipline.

Finally, here is the long awaited fourth part in my three part series examining the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee response to the allegations of scientific misconduct against Spencer Lucas and co-workers. Part 3 was a detailed examination of the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by this committee. In this post, I make a brief foray into the conversations paleontologists have been having online about their understanding of the accepted practices in their field. As these conversations are ongoing (and some of them are happening on listservs to which I do…

An alternative cancer cure testimonial, mistletoe, and Johns Hopkins University

Ever since the beginning of this blog, there's one topic I've explored many, many times, mainly because of its direct relationship to my profession as a cancer surgeon. That topic is, of course, the question of why people fall for alternative medicine cancer "cures." It started with one of my very earliest posts and continued right up to deconstructing Presidential candidate Ben Carson's very own alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial last fall. It continues again now. Regular readers, particularly long time readers, have already come to recognize common themes in these alternative…

"Building bridges" to the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement?

Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it's been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it's been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that I start driving away readers, I've just decided to ride the wave and go with it until it's over. Unless something blows up over the weekend, I rather suspect that, for all intents and purposes, it'll be over as of today and I can move on to other topics starting Monday. At least I hope so. But there'…

Beat the medical odds?

You don't tug on Superman's cape You don't spit into the wind You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger And you don't mess around with Jim - Jim Croce I love it when a commenter gives me blogging material. Let's face it. Blogging is a tough hobby. As much as I do love it so, sometimes I'm at a loss for blogging material. Some would argue that when that happens but not me. Why? Because the blogosphere will provide. At least, it has each and every time that I've ever run into difficulties. Of course, it's even nicer when blogging material is delivered up to me right there in the…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: A homeopathic journal club

So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere. Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed. Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…

Animal "rights" terrorism

While I was catching up on some of the stuff that's happened while I was away, I noticed PZ Myer's article about animal rights terrorists who intimidated a neurobiologist at UCLA named Dario Ringach to the point where he decided to stop doing research on primates. Then I saw that Jake and Bora also weighed in on the issue (although for the life of me I can't figure out how on earth Bora came to the conclusion that animal rights is a conservative philosophy at its core--his explanation is tortured, at best). Here's what happened, as reported in Inside Higher Ed: Ringach's name and home phone…

Conspiracy theories: The dark heart of alternative medicine

If there's one thing a budding skeptic quickly learns is that at the core of any good woo almost invariably lurks at least one conspiracy theory. At the risk of flirting a little too close to Godwin territory, this simple fact about pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based belief systems was first driven home to me around 15 years ago when I first started becoming interested in Holocaust denial. It didn't take too long for me to discover that at the heart of Holocaust denial are various conspiracy theories. Somehow the Jews, we are told, conspired to exaggerate the number of…

Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we? (2012 edition)

I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me glad that I didn't blog about this back on Monday, when the study that is the focus of this disturbance was published. Had I written about it then, all I would have had as fodder was the study itself. However, waiting a couple of days has allowed me to see the reaction of the…

Another Week of GW News, April 19, 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 April 19, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Rapid Sea Level Rise, Endangerment Finding, Red River Flooding Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Cash4Clunkers, Aerosols, Grumbine, Copenhagen Survey Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, ENSO, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wildfires…

Low Energy Basics: Laundry

I'm doing the laundry! - The Tick A new reader, Karen, (yay, new readers!) writes: I really want to use less energy because my husband is out of work and I care about the planet - can you write about how you do it? We try and conserve, but our utility bills tell me we're not doing that great a job. I guess I care most about the everyday stuff - how you do the laundry, get to places, cook dinner, etc... Thank you, Karen, for the push, since I'm supposed to be writing a book on precisely this subject right now, and instead have mostly, well, not been. So I thought I'd do a series of…

A New Field Guide to the Birds from The Smithsonian

OK, not so new, but still relevant. The following is a repost of a review of this book. New Smithsonian Field Guide Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd is a newcomer to the bird field guide scene. This guide offers a new combination of features that may make it the best choice as the primary guide for a small number of birders, and as an excellent second (or third) guide for most birdwatchers. Given the guide's qualities and price (it is not expensive) if you are a North American birder (anywhere in the region) this is a must-have for your collection,…

A New Field Guide to the Birds from The Smithsonian

New Smithsonian Field Guide Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd is a newcomer to the bird field guide scene. This guide offers a new combination of features that may make it the best choice as the primary guide for a small number of birders, and as an excellent second (or third) guide for most birdwatchers. Given the guide's qualities and price (it is not expensive) if you are a North American birder (anywhere in the region) this is a must-have for your collection, and if you know a birder who is having a present-able event (birthday, etc.) any time in the…

Health Care Debate, part Three

Ordinarily, I dislike fisking as a literary style, but it does have its place.  This is one of them.  As noted in the two previous posts, href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate.php">(Part One, href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate_part_two.php">Part Two) some authors from the Cato Institute managed to get an opinion piece published in the LA Times:  href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-tanner5apr05,1,6553974.story?ctrack=2&cset=true">Universal healthcare's dirty little secrets.  In…

Combatting antiscience denialism and quackery

I spent a nice long weekend in New York at NECSS, which has grown to quite the big skeptical conference since the last time I was there five years ago. The Friday Science-Based Medicine session went quite well and, as far as I could tell, appeared to be well-received; so hopefully we will be doing something like it again next year. And, heck, I got to meet Bill Nye. How cool is that? One topic that came up over and over at NECSS had to do with what is the best way to communicate science and, in particular, contrast it to the unfortunately all-too-common denialist antiscience doctrines of the…

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro issue a $100,000 vaccine "challenge." It's every bit as much as scam as Jock Doubleday's "vaccine challenge" was a decade ago.

I must admit, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., environmentalist and, unfortunately, antivaccine crank of the thimerosal fear mongering variety, has been rather busy lately. After having gone mostly silent on vaccine issues compared to his original flurry of misinformation and conspiracy mongering back that began back in 2005, several years past with almost nary a word from the lesser scion of a great American family on vaccines. This was a very good thing. Then, in 2014, he decided to reappear, co-authoring an antivaccine book with functional medicine quack Mark Hyman, a book with mouthful of a title…