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Another Week of GW News, August 9, 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 Another Week of Global Warming News Information overload is pattern recognition August 9, 2009 Chuckle, Coal Fight, Bonner & Assoc., USGS, Pacific Island States, Cash4Clunkers, EPRI Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Methane, Antarctica, Carbon Tariffs, APA, Milankovitch, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures…

Another Week of GW News, November 23, 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) Another Week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition November 23, 2008 Top Stories:IEA WEO, Poznan, Recession, Global Trends 2025 Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctic, Winter Forecasts, ABC, H2O Machine, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests,…

Oh, goody. Suzanne Somers has found new woo

Bizarrely enough, Suzanne Somers has been a common topic of discussion on this blog since the very beginning. Indeed, in one of my earliest substantive posts, way back in December 2004 when I had just started this blog on Blogger, I used her as an example of how misleading breast cancer testimonials can be. At the time, I only knew Somers as a breast cancer survivor who had decided to turn to "alternative" therapy. What she really meant was that she had undergone surgery and radiation but had decided not to undergo chemotherapy, opting instead for mistletoe extract I also explained at the…

Another Week of GW News, March 2, 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 Sipping from the internet firehose... March 1, 2009 Top Stories:PowerShift, OCO, Smith et al., Barker et al., Ocean Circulation, Economy, Blogostorm Melting Arctic, International Polar Year, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Earth Hour, Monsoons, Aerosols, Grumbine, Brooks Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks,…

The "Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act of 2014": Pernicious "health freedom" nonsense that degrades human research subject protections

I was torn about what to blog about today. There were lots of things floating around that caught my eye and appear worthy of of a little taste of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, so much so that I couldn't decide. None of them really stuck out. Then I saw this news story pop up in my Google Alerts, Houston-area doctor grateful for time spent with Pope John Paul II: My first thought was that Stanislaw Burzynski must have one hell of a publicist. Either that, or he has a good buddy at KHOU in Houston. My second thought was of a bill that was recently…

Falsehood: "Voters are kept from political involvement by the rules"

Voting is not party involvement. We hear a lot of talk these days about "voters" being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform -- why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us -- that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call…

Ron Paul: Quackery enabler

Lately, bloggers, including some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, have been expressing various concerns about the phenomenon that is Ron Paul, the Republican candidate who's ridden a wave of discontent to do surprisingly well in the polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. First, Jake and Greg have pointed out that Ron Paul apparently does not accept the theory of evolution. The other day, Ed Brayton and Sara Robinson discussed a story about an open letter by Bill White, the leader of the American Socialist Workers' Party, in which White claimed that Paul and his aides…

Death by intravenous "turmeric": Naturopaths circle the wagons and the chair of the Naturopathic Medical Committee of California looks for dirt on conventional medicine

Yesterday, I wrote about the case of Jade Erick, a 30-year-old woman whose death was caused by naturopathic quackery. It's not entirely clear if it was intravenous turmeric that killed her. That's what the press consistently reported. It's more likely that it was intravenous curcumin, which is derived from turmeric. Whatever the case, Erick very rapidly went into cardiac arrest as the infusion began. When first I discussed the Erick case, the identity of the naturopath was unknown because, for whatever reason, the press was not reporting it at the time. But yesterday the naturopath was…

Some "inconvenient questions" for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins tomorrow

The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of. Let's backtrack a minute. A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins was being given to someone who was so radically, unbelievably unworthy of such an honor, that I likened giving the Richard Dawkins Award to Bill Maher to giving a public health award to Jenny McCarthy. (In deference to Professor Dawkins, perhaps I'll now liken it to giving such an award to MMR anti-…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics - November 17, 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 As We Enter a New Age of ConsequencesNovember 17, 2013 Chuckles, COP19, Dailies, WMO, WEO, Cowtan & Way, GermanWatch WG2 Leak, Maldives, Energiewende, Estrada, Subsidies, Pricing Nature, CookFukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Haiyan, Recovery, Zoraida, Misc. Notable Weather, Extreme Weather…

The Warriors

More than a year ago (September 26, 2005), and what has changed? ------------------------------------- The other day I saw (on a blog, from an e-mail? Don't remember now...) this article about a porn website on which our soldiers in Iraq exchange gory photos of mutilated Iraqi bodies for a free subscription to porn. War Pornography was published on a news website I was not familiar with, so I posted the link in the comments to a couple of good liberal blogs, asking for the verification of the story. The next day, Nation published a shorter story on the same topic: The Porn of War, which…

Gary Kaiser's The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution

Good, non-technical books on anatomy are rare; good, non-technical books on avian anatomy are just about non-existent. Gary Kaiser's The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution stands out as one of a kind - it is not brand-new (having been published in 2007), but still has yet to be widely recognised as the valuable piece of scholarship that it is. I will state here at the outset that I cannot recommend it highly enough. Containing a wealth of information that ranges from the Mesozoic ancestry of birds to neornithine phylogeny, flight dynamics, functional morphology and ecology, it should be…

What if, rather than being too stringent about drug approval, the FDA is not being stringent enough?

There is a belief that is very prevalent among policymakers right now, particularly Republican policymakers, that the key impediment to drug development is the Food and Drug Administration. According to this narrative, the FDA is an overly strict, overly bureaucratic, and rigid organization that is the main barrier keeping fantastic cures to all sorts of deadly and debilitating diseases from flowing to the people at a reasonable price. The basic idea, as I've discussed many times, is that, if only the FDA would get out of the way, universities and pharma would be free to open the floodgates…

No Coke, No Pepsi Either?

In which I suggest a way that Pepsigate could have been different. I think PepsiCo's research scientists have something to say that I want to listen to. So do the scientists at Coke. And Cargill. The reason I think this is that some of my own research involves diet and nutrition, and I assume that the bench scientists working in the food industry are busy figuring stuff out at the molecular and biochemical level that I would not mind knowing. Strike that: I know they are figuring stuff out. A few years back I had the honor and pleasure of being asked to give the keynote speech at a…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: "Magickal" psychic amplification a-go-go!

Readers who have followed my little Friday bit of fun every week have probably, like me, at times sat in front of their computer screens, jaw drooping, a little bit of spittle starting to drip out of the corners of their mouths, and eyes agape with wonder at just how anyone on earth could believe some of this stuff. Indeed, it is truly unbelievable to anyone with just a modicum of critical thinking skills. Sometimes, as I have, you've almost certainly laughed out loud at the silliness. Sometimes, as I have, you've probably had to stop reading because you feared that the concentrated woo in…

Another week of GW News, June 13, 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJune 13, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, REDD, COP15, COP16+, IPBES, IPY-OSC, Northern Weather, Backgrounder Bottom Line, Total Subsidies, Subsidies, UNCFG, Free Science, Beeville Hoax, Post-CRU Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons: Medical "science" as dubious as it gets

I'm beginning to fear for Kathleen Seidel. No, I don't fear for her safety, but I do fear for her sanity. You see, she's spent way too much time delving into the house organ of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), namely The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (with the unfortunate abbreviation JAPS, which is why they probably insist on using JPANDS), formerly known as Medical Sentinel. I've written about JPANDS before, pointing out that its claim of peer review is a sham and that it has an explicitly antivaccine agenda, not to mention its far right wing…

On vaccines and autism, child pornography, and seeing "bullies" everywhere

Bullying. You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Yes, I do so love to co-opt that famous line from The Princess Bride for my own nefarious purposes, but it's so perfect for this particular topic, which comes up every so often when I'm writing about the pseudoscience behind the antivaccine movement. It usually takes the form of an emotional screed by some antivaccine parent or other complaining about how she's being "bullied" by us nasty, evil, insensitive pro-vaccine, well, bullies. (They frequently repeat the word many times throughout the course of their…

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I'm sure it's obvious that I'm often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently "and") have failed to show evidence of any therapeutic effect greater than that of placebo in clinical trials manage to retain so much traction among the public. Examples abound, for instance homeopathy and reiki, the former of which is nothing more than sympathetic magic prettied up with science-y…

A homeopathic journal club

Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time). I'll be back tomorrow. So, after nearly two weeks of…

R.I.P., McKenzie Lowe. Stanislaw Burzynski failed you.

R.I.P., McKenzie Lowe. Unfortunately, Stanislaw Burzynski was no more able to save you than anyone else, his claims of great success treating pediatric brain tumors notwithstanding: HUDSON — Thirteen-year-old Hudson resident McKenzie Lowe died Friday evening after a 2-year-battle against an aggressive and inoperable brain stem tumor. McKenzie died at 10:27 p.m. in her own bed at her home in Hudson. McKenzie was diagnosed on Nov. 28, 2012 with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG, a brain tumor located on the brain stem. Patients with DIPG typically survive for less than a year.…

Combining childhood vaccines at one visit is not safe? Wrong, wrong, wrong!

I sensed a disturbance in the antivaccine (i.e, the dark) side of the Force yesterday. No matter where I wandered online and on social media, I kept running into a new article, an article by Neil Z. Miller about vaccines. For example, the merry band of antivaccine propagandists over at Age of Autism seem to like Miller’s article very, very much. So did the vaccine truthers over at—where else?—VacTruth.org. I kept seeing it on Facebook and Twitter, too. Even though the current vaccine schedule is safe and effective as well as evidence-based and the claim that we give too many vaccines too soon…

A study that oversells massage therapy

If there's one form of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that I find more tolerable than most, it's massage therapy. The reason, of course, is that, whatever else anyone claims about massage, there's no doubt that it feels good. All too often, however, massage therapists ruin a perfectly good massage by imposing pseudoscientific and quack claims on it, such as claims that they are stimulating acupressure points or their adoption of the language of "energy healing." So it was with a bit of trepidation (but also more than a bit of interest) that I took a look at some…

Holocaust denial from the White House on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Most of my regular readers probably haven't been following this blog long enough to know it, but early in its history this blog was more of a general skeptical blog. True, it always had a heavy emphasis on medical science and pseudoscience, but I also used to write about evolution and other topics from a skeptic perspective. Back then, dating back to the very earliest days after I discovered blogging, Holocaust denial was a frequent topic on this blog because it was a big interest of mine. It still is, even though I haven't had much opportunity to write about it over the last few years. It…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 360 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 360 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

Birds in the News 54 (v2n5)

Dark-eyed junco, Junco hyemalis. Click image for a larger view in its own window. Photo by Dawn Bailey and appears here by permission. Birds in Science A Duke University evolutionary ecologist reported evidence that aggressive male western bluebirds, Sialia mexicana, out-compete less aggressive males for preferred breeding territories, a finding that may offer more insight into how evolution operates. This research, conducted by Renée Duckworth suggests the birds may play more active roles in their own natural selection than traditional models of evolution would support. Further, it was…

Where I'll Be at Worldcon

The Worldcon program has been posted, but only as a giant, confusing PDF. I was getting cross-eyed trying to figure things out, so I ended up creating my own blank grid sheets, and making notes on those. The following is a by-no-means comprehensive list of things I think look interesting enough to attend. There are only a handful of thing that I'll definitely be at (I'll mark those in bold), but I'll probably choose many of the rest from this list: Thursday 15:30: Re-reading Graham Sleight, Jo Walton, Kate Nepveu, Larry Niven There is a school of thought that re-reading is a juvenile habit,…

Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denial, and the problem of "recantation" by cranks

It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I've had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust…

Joe Mercola's shampoo woo

Even after having been at this skeptical medical blogging game for nearly six years, every so often I still come across woo about which I had been previously unaware. It's hard to believe, but it's true. In fact, I'm beginning to think that, even if I were to keep blogging until I drop dead (hopefully at least thirty or forty years in the future), as I type out my last extra cantankerous bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence (my cantankerousness merely increasing with advancing age, of course), I would come across some new and spectacular form of woo that somehow had been missed during my forty-…

The drip, drip, drip, drip of FDA findings against Stanislaw Burzynski continues

The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle. Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…

Overselling preclinical results

As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I've probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and various antivaccine websites. I think of it as my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the antiscience and pseudoscience wing of medicine, but I must admit that I don't really read them all, but they do allow me to know what the quacks are selling and what new…

Another Week of GW News, March 15, 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 March 15, 2009 Top Stories:Copenhagen, Nanoballs, Spin Battery, Particulates, Polls, Planetary Skin Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Methane, CC Debate, Maldives, Earth Hour, Recession, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky…

Would you like a liver flush with that colon cleanse?

I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006. I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not…

Comments of the Week #173: From quantum uncertainty to Earth's final total solar eclipse

“It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” ―Galadriel, LOTR, J.R.R. Tolkien The scientific stories we've covered this week have been out-of-this-world here at Starts With A Bang! But the greatest show is still to come. Right now, I'm on my way down to the path of totality in Oregon, along with millions of others hoping to catch a glimpse and enjoy the experience of a sight unlike any others on Earth. When the sunlight goes completely out, some truly wonderful things will be revealed, and I hope to see them all…

Double Comments of the Week #170: From terraforming Mars to what is and isn't expanding

“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived.” -Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore, and Rick Berman After being away for last weekend, it's time to take a look back at the past two weeks on Starts With A Bang! There's been no shortage of stories, of news, or of scientific matters of interest, so let's see what we've got: Is it foolishness to dream of…

Another Week of GW News, April 6, 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:Bangkok UNFCCC Conference, BC Cap & Trade, Otway, Food Panik Melting Arctic, Pielke & Co., GCMs, No Link, IMF, World Bank, Short Takes & Late Comments GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration,…

Boston - Part 2: Publishing in the New Millennium

It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference. Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all. So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold). The Keynote About an hour or so before the conference, we started…

Guest Post: I Remember Hovey

This is a guest post written by Skip Evans. Skip is a dear friend I have known for many years. He worked for some time for the National Center for Science Education and now owns a web development company called Big Sky Penguin. This is the sordid tale of his repeated dealings with the infamous creationist Kent Hovind. Perhaps I'll add my own story to it at the end. I Remember Hovey With the news of Kent Hovind's arrest, I began reflecting on my past interactions with the man I regard as the nuttiest cookie in the jar of creationism. I mean, this is a guy that even fruit loops like Ken Ham…

It's 2014, and Stanislaw Burzynski has begun his counteroffensive

Well, that didn't take long. I knew it had been too quiet on the Burzynski front. In retrospect, that was almost certainly because of the holidays, but the holidays are over, and real life is here again. Yes, the year 2014 is only a little more than a week old, and here comes Stanislaw Burzynski again, hurt but not defeated in the wake of all the negative publicity he received late last year, thanks to Liz Szabo's USA TODAY expose. Actually, in a way it might have been a good thing that I was delayed in addressing this a day by my little bit of weakness Tuesday night that led mere exhaustion…

Paleo and woo: Bad company until the day they die

There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds." If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it's natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it's really old, it must be better). Of course, the two fallacies are not unrelated. In the minds of CAM…

Emergency acupuncture! (2017 edition)

If there's one form of quackery that is among the most "respected," it has to be acupuncture. I've often speculated about why this might be, and the best that I can come up with is that doctors are a bit more open to acupuncture because it involves sticking actual needles into the body. It's very easy to ignore the mystical, vitalistic BS about "redirecting the flow of qi" because doctors can easily handwave and postulate other, more scientific-sounding explanations, such as that it releases endorphins or adenosine. If that doesn't work, then acupuncturists add electricity and thereby rebrand…

Triaging Your Adapting in Place Situation

This post ran a year and half ago at The Oil Drum, but I thought it was worth re-running, as I begin my new Adapting in Place class (still two spots if anyone wants them - email jewishfarmer@gmail.com - and no, it isn't too late!). How do you even get started thinking about how to prepare for a lower energy and less stable climate future? Beginnings The first question to ask is whether we should take in-place Adaptation seriously at all. Shouldn't we, ideally, try and choose the best possible place to deal with the coming crisis? Some analysts suggest we will have to have vast population…

2010 Predictions: Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a…

Best applications to install on your new Mac

What are the best applications, free or cheap, to install on your iMac for basic tasks and productivity? This post is to guide you in the careful and considered upgrade to your newly acquired iMac or other Mac OSX machine, especially for non-Mac experts. For each of the categories of work you may want to do with your computer, I suggest a number of applications beginning, where possible, with the applications already on your computer, then moving on to free alternatives, then inexpensive paid alternatives. In many cases there is a high end expensive alternative that is probably very wonderful…

Another Week of Climate Disruption News, April 27, 2014

(featured image taken from here) 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 April 27, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, Post WG3, Earth Day, Earth Year, Energiewende Bottom Line, Pricing Nature, Crap Detector, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food Riots, Agro Corps, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather, Forecasts, GHGs,…

Cincinnati Magazine on the Creation Museum

Remember that trip to the Creation Museum during the big paleontology conference this summer? Linda Vaccariello has a lengthy, and pretty good, article about it in the current issue of Cincinnati Magazine. Here's a nugget I liked: Looking over the exhibits in the Dinosaur Den, we learn that the flood killed all the dinosaurs except for the ones on Noah's ark. “But their days were numbered,” the signage explains ominously. What happened? Here, the museum makes a rare admission of uncertainty. But it does present a tantalizing possibility: “Dragons could have been dinosaurs,” the sign says.…

How Supermans X-Ray vision works

So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision" But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers. In Correcting Misconceptions…

Another Week of GW News, August 12, 2012

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 Years August 12, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, COP18+, 2 Degrees, Elgin, BEST, Truthiness Bottom Line, Pricing Nature, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Greenland, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Nitrogen Cycle, Temperatures…

Another week of GW News, July 11, 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 Sipping from the internet firehose...July 11, 2010 Chuckles, COP16+, USSF, GGCS, Ooops, Beer et al., Hoegh-Guldberg & Bruno, PepsiGate Subsidies, Abuse, NEAA-PBL, Slant, Muir Russell, Post CRU, Media Complicity, FOI Attack Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, GMOs & IP Issues, FAOSTAT, Food…