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New Weekly Toll Posted

In continuation of the tradition begun at Jordan Barabâs Confined Space blog, Tammy has posted another edition of the Weekly Toll: Death in the American Workplace at her Weekly Toll blog. It gives short writeups on 81 workplace deaths, including the following: Eric Jones, a 34-year-old Burlington, Wisconsin resident who fell 90 feet from the basket of a utility truck while repairing ice-damaged transmission lines. Mahendrabhai Gordham Omar Patela, 48, who was shot during a robbery of his Fort Mills, South Carolina store. Admont J. Znotin, a 43-year-old carpenter from Buzzards Bay,…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 16

I can't see that I'm going to have the chance today to post an article, so here's another picture. Sorry it's not the best photo in the world. But the question is... ... whose skull is it? Well, I know what it is of course - but do you? Invariably the reaction from laypeople has been that it must be from a dinosaur. But then, I lost count of how many children identified a horse skull as that of a Tyrannosaurus rex at the recent Springwatch festival. And no cheating from those who have seen the exact same photo before! This reminds me - I never gave Adam Yates his prize for being king of the…

Abrogation

This is another fine word that I found in Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. I am still nearly finished with this book and will be reading a new one tomorrow. Abrogation (ab-RUH-gey-shun) [from Latin abrogÄtus repealed] noun. to abolish by formal or official means; annul by an authoritative act; repeal: to abrogate a law. to put aside; put an end to. Usage: Sookhdeo goes on to explain how Islamic scholars, in order to cope with the many contradictions that they found in the Qur'an, developed the principle of abrogation, whereby later texts trump earlier ones.…

The Circle Game

UK astro staggers back to life... And the seasons they go round and round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game STFC announces UK participation in Gemini is back on - from astrophycisist2b Apparently someone in admistradialand can still do arithmetic and figured out that the cost penalty of walking away from Gemini was about the same as staying in, on the relevant cost cutting time scale. New plan is to recover costs by selling UK time...ok. To…

Bacterial metagenomics on the JHU campus: analyzing the data, part II

What do you do after you've used DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria, viruses, or other organisms in the environment? What's the next step? This four part video series covers those next steps. In this part, we learn that a surprisingly large portion of bioinformatics, or any type of informatics is concerned with fixing data entry errors and spelling mistakes. The parts of this series are: I. Downloading the data from iFinch and preparing it for analysis. (this is the video below) (We split the data from one column into three). II. Cleaning up the data III. Counting all the bacteria…

"Here in the North there is no such thing as monkeys."

OK, Canadians, 'fess up. I know you guys are so danged nice and polite…this is just an attempt to make your Southern neighbor feel less uniquely stupid, isn't it? You put up some obliging Québécois Inuit Pentecostals to pretend to be as dumb as a Kansas preacher, didn't you? "If the town complains and says no, the committee can ask the principal or the director of teachers to approach the teacher and say, 'Look, this is not the subject to be taught here in this town, or in this place, because we know we have been humans from the beginning, '" said Molly Tayara. "I don't personally accept my…

Saltsjöbaden Train / House Crash

Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our camera. Details here. . Update 21 January: On the basis of first reports and information from a former railway employee, I thought this was an ostentatious suicide attempt. Now there are indications that it was a horrific accident caused by the unsanctioned habits of train drivers. Apparently they routinely jury-rig the safety apparatus for convenience, and in cold weather, to keep the brakes…

Our ancestors were weirdos

And we're not much better. Some photographic souvenirs of a recent trip to Bruxelles. From the cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula. A hard-to-believe statue. It looks less rude from other angles. This one shows *two* enormous organs. Musee des beaux arts. The woman is holding a bar of glowing hot iron; hence the little tray of charcoal in the foreground. Notice the burning witch in the background. See also this charming mural from Bayeaux featuring some hand-chopping legend of which I know nothing. Did you know that if you type "justice de otton" into google, at the moment my flickr page…

Lecture Notes Dump

For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here's a bunch of lectures about photons: Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons. Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field. Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry. Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states. This material, unsurprisingly, produced the most panicked looks from students to this point. One of the homework problems was also to recapticulate a couple of calculations from a Phys. Rev. A…

Ebola in the US Update

Of the seven Americans who have contracted Ebola, five overseas and two in Texas, all seven have survived. Comments from President Obama, focusing on how we have to be guided by the science: "Here’s the bottom line. Patients can beat this disease. And we can beat this disease. But we have to stay vigilant. We have to work together at every level — federal, state and local. And we have to keep leading the global response, because the best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source — in West Africa." CDC Update page for the West African outbreak…

Please do not shoot the endangered animals

It is illegal to shoot a cougar in Minnesota unless it is about to eat you. This did not stop Bruce Ihnen and Daniel Hamman from killing one of these beautiful beasts. Ihnen and Hamman need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Which, unfortunately, is not much. A hand slap, really. The DNR is investigating the case for possible charges. Mountain lions are protected in Minnesota and killing one is a misdemeanor unless it poses an immediate threat to human life. The incident occurred in the southwestern part of the state (down 'round these parts) where almost everything is corn…

Metal Detectorist Tattoo #4 - Mortensen

Jan Mortensen's tattoo Another metal detectorist tattoo! This time it's Jan Mortensen who has decorated the arm with which he brandishes the detector. The object is a 10th century trefoil brooch that Jan found in Holbæk municipality, northern Zealand. Hugo Tattoo in Holbæk did the needlework. Trefoil brooches were worn by South Scandinavian women as a third brooch, to close their cloaks. But the overall shape descended from high-end acanthus-decorated silver mounts for the bandoliers worn by Charlemagne's vassals around AD 800. Their trefoils joined the strap from the scabbard to the ends…

New boss same as the old boss

Kentucky, you're on notice. The chairman of the joint Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee is holding hearings to promote ignorance and denialism. This is appalling. Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify. "You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times," said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats' chief environmental strategist. "We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood." Neither of Gooch's invited panelists was a…

Sättuna Barrow Seen from Boat

My dad tried out his new motorboat recently, going with my extra mom from Stockholm around Scania to Gothenburg and then across the country through the Göta Canal to Norrköping and back north to Stockholm again. Passing through Lake Roxen he sought out Sättuna in Kaga parish on the lake's SW shore and took the above picture for me of the Sättuna barrow from the water. Below is a pic I took myself in September 2006. I want to radiocarbon date that mutha before the resident badger trashes its innards completely! I'm glad to have a picture of the site from the lake, as Sättuna means "the tuna…

Court Overturns State Wine Laws

This is good news. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has overturned state laws banning the shipment of wine over state lines. 24 states have laws that treat direct shipments of wine from winemakers out of state to customers in that state differently than shipments from winemakers within the state. 24 states had laws either banning or restricting such sales and they are now overturned. I've not read the decision, but it's worth noting that the majority opinion was joined by a rather odd collection - Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. That's two fairly reliable liberals, two…

Ian Musgrave on Jury-Rigged Design

If you have not checked out the Panda's Thumb, I recommend starting with this post by Ian Musgrave. It is a devestating critique of an article by Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Witt. Ian is an Australian biochemist and he simply shreds Witt's arguments against the argument from jury-rigged design. It is an appropriate venue for such an article, since the "panda's thumb" is a textbook example of how evolution cobbles together useful structures out of existing ones, as would be expected. If an omnipotent designer had started from scratch, it would certainly have done a better job of it…

Your Cheery Race-in-America Thought for the Day

From Inside Higher Ed: Data drawn from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual survey of graduation rates, analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, show that scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduates at 96 of the nearly 330 colleges that play sports in Division I, the NCAA's top competitive level. At 46 of those colleges, according to the data, which are from 2005-6, at least a third of the black male population play a sport. And at 31 one of them, football players alone make up at least a quarter of the black undergraduate men. All told,…

Earliest Animals

A Much Earlier Start for Animals Where did all the animals come from? ... The problem with the earliest animals, from a paleontologist's perspective, is that they lacked hard parts. ... The answer lies in the unique molecules they left behind.... one such molecule [c]alled 24-IPC, ... is only produced by Demospongiae, a class of animals that includes most modern sponges and is thought to constitute the roots of the animal family tree. The researchers acquired 30 pristine drill cores removed from underneath the southern Arabian Peninsula by the oil company Petroleum Development Oman. The…

Why We Should Teach Evolution

My account of the big creationism conference will go up soon, but in the meantime you can tide yourself over with this op-ed from yesterday's New York Times. Olivia Judson explains a few of the reasons it is important to teach evolution in science classes. I especially liked this: The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence -- or indeed, evidence of any kind -- has permeated the Bush…

Uncertain Dots, Episode 5

In which Rhett and I talk about color vision, undergraduate research projects, blog networks, outreach activities, and how thermodynamics is a lie. Things mentioned in the discussion: The Flame Challenge My post about looking at computer monitors with a spectrometer Physics Quest I'm inadvertently doing a bit of product placement here-- the T-shirt I'm wearing is from Surviving the World, and the water bottle I'm drinking from is from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo. I expected it to be colder in my office on campus, but it was actually pretty warm, so I took off the other…

links for 2009-04-26

ROCKET SCIENCE « Pundit Kitchen: Lol News and Lol Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and more "It really is that hard, but the results kick ass." (tags: science astronomy space silly pictures internet) http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physics-faq.txt "This document (a simple ASCII file) contains answers to some more or less frequently asked questions from theoretical physics. Currently, the FAQ contains 148 topics, grouped into 20 chapters, and filling over 10000 lines of text (about half a megabyte), corresponding to a book of about 200 pages. Starting in 2004, the…

Truth in Error Messages

From the tablet today: Yes, oh, yes it was... The problem here, from my perspective, is that when the tablet is plugged into a power supply, it does not go to sleep properly. I can put it to sleep, and then connect it to charge the battery, but a few hours later, it will just be off, and when I turn it back on, I get the "Resuming Windows" screen, and it takes much longer to re-start than when it wakes up from being in sleep mode. I've sort of grown resigned to this. every now and then, though, it pops up an actual error message (generally "Windows Host Process experienced an error and had…

It Snows In Detroit, Right?

I'm very happy with my 2007 Ford Freestyle, but there's one major design flaw that drives me nuts. It's only a problem in the winter, though, which makes me wonder what the hell the folks in Detroit are smoking. If you look at the picture, you can just make out the antenna, on the passenger side of the windshield. It's attached to the car just an inch or two from the lower right-hand corner of the windshield, seen from inside the car. Now, take five seconds, and think about what you would need to do, and where you would need to stand, in order to remove snow or ice from the windshield. Do you…

New Ant Genera from Madagascar: Aptinoma & Ravavy

Aptinoma antongil Fisher 2009 Brian Fisher has a paper out in Zootaxa this week describing a pair of new ant genera from Madagascar.  Aptinoma and Ravavy are small ants in the subfamily dolichoderinae related to Tapinoma and Technomyrmex.  Apparently, the backstory on these new ants is that ongoing genetic research from the Ant Tree of Life project revealed some Malagasy specimens to be rather distantly related to any of the previously described genera.  On closer morphological inspection, Fisher found several differences that allow for the new genera to be reliably diagnosed. Yet…

New species: Forelius damiani

Forelius damiani Guerrero & Fernández 2008 Colombia The ant genus Forelius - named for the eminent Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel-  is known for its abundance in hot, dry climates in both North and South America.  This affinity for deserts has given the genus a markedly disjunct distribution, abundant in subtropical South America and in the warmer regions of North and Central America but absent in the more humid intervening climes.  Or so we'd assumed. Last week Colombian myrmecologists Roberto Guerrero & Fernando Fernández filled the gap with a newly-discovered species of…

Be Careful Making "Drug" Claims...

These aren't the 1920s. If you want to get your remedy approved as a drug, you've got to abide by the rules everyone else plays by. From the FDA press release: At FDA's request, U.S. marshals have seized about $71,000 worth of products from Florida-based FulLife Natural Options Inc. after the agency determined that FulLife violated food and drug law by promoting certain products for use in treating serious conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Because of the claims, FDA considers the products -- Charantea Ampalaya Capsules and Charantea Ampalaya Tea -- to be unapproved drugs.…

Casey Luskin is a WHAT?

The Koolade over at ARN is particularly strong today. Robert Deyes speaks of "biologist Casey Luskin". Seriously. At best, Luskin was a geologist MS in earth sciences before becoming a lawyer. He has one (second-author) paper: Lisa Tauxe, Casey Luskin, Peter Selkin, Phillip Gans, and Andy Calvert, “Paleomagnetic results from the Snake River Plain: Contribution to the time-averaged field global database,” Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems (G3), 5(8) (August, 2004). Creationist credentialing once again, I fear. Equally as problematic is Deyes' claim: We learn many a lesson from Conan Doyle's…

This Otter is So Cute It Defies Description

I am not usually the type to put pictures of cute animals up. I leave that to Cute Overload. I don't really even like animals. (I know...shameful coming from a biologist.) But this otter is so cute it...it just defies description. It was rescued from abandonment in Scotland. Frankly, it makes your average puppy look like a big, fat sack of crap. It is like they distilled cute into an absinthe-strength cute beverage -- a beverage that will make you wake up the next day and never want to drink cute again. This otter makes you sad to be a member of the human species, doomed to produce…

Now That's A Petition

You may have heard about a petition that was being signed by scientists earlier this month against the teaching of intelligent design. The inspiration came from another petition drafted by the Discovery Institute opposing evolution. It garnered 400 signatures of scientists in four years. R. Joe Brandon, an archaeologist, decided to see how many signatures he could get from scientists in just four days by spreading the word from his web site. The answer: 7,733. "During my short, four-day experiment, I recieved about 20 times as many signatures at a rate 690,000% higher than what the…

ScienceBlogs One Millionth Comment Party in London

We are close! You could be the one and if you are you will be teleported to NYC for a party with people from other dimensions. It's time to celebrate the conversations we have had all through these years. Come join us Saturday 20 September in London at Calthorpe Arms, a pub near Russell Square and King's Cross (details) from 7:00 pm. Free drinks, food till we run out of money (we have $500 from our Sb overlords). Bloggers in attendance: Mo Costandi (Neurophilosophy), Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science), Kara Contreary (Pure Pedantry), Nick Anthis (The Scientific Activist) and yours truly.…

Regular transmissions to resume shortly

As you can probably tell from the last two "photos of the day", I'm back from Utah. It was a wonderful trip, but I have been too swamped with other projects/commitments to get this blog back up to speed. Regular blog entries will resume soon. After reading S.J. Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack while in transit to and from the beehive state, however, I started to reconsider what this blog is meant to be. Specifically, I am thinking of writing higher-quality essays less often than simply trying to feed this blog every weekday. This will be an experiment (Laelaps is, after all, a writing lab first…

The grand unification of Cognitive Daily

The transfer of archives from the old Cognitive Daily site is now complete; all of our archives are now available here at ScienceBlogs! There really are some amazing articles back there. Here are some of my favorites from CogDaily's adolescent months: Can our understanding of "Normal" and "Beautiful" be distorted? A boy and his dog False confessions: Not as rare as you think Do women perceive color differently from men? Can we compensate for the distraction of driving with a cell phone? The Mozart Effect: Is it really all about attitude? Is the mind like a computer? Evidence that it is not…

With Honors. Without Options?

Fact: According to the National Postdoc Association, between 1972 and 2003, the percent of recent Ph.D. holders hired into full-time faculty positions fell from 74% to 44%. Fact: During the same period, the number of post docs in science and engineering has increased from 13% to 34%. Fact: The probability that a Ph.D. recipient under 35 will obtain a tenure-track job has fallen from 10% in 1993 to 7% in 2003. Unfortunately, these numbers just don't add up to my satisfaction... So what's going on? Read my full post now up over at Correlations which begins to examine the problem by…

Why Didn't We Have Something This Between the Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain?

From Jeff Masters' blog, describing the Dutch response to a powerful North Sea storm: While today's storm did not approach the 1953 storm in severity, it did bring the highest storm surge seen in the past 20 years to the North Sea. The massive flood gates that protect the Dutch port of Rotterdam were closed for the first time since they were constructed in the 1990s. From early media accounts, the gates did their job admirably, protecting the Netherlands from inundation. Water levels reached 3.16 meters above mean sea level in the southern Netherlands, and 3.40 meters above sea level in the…

Reincarnation Banned

Separation of Church and State often is controversial.  Sometimes I worry about this in the USA, but I have never seen anything as bad as what they are doing in China: href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2194682.ece">China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate From The Times August 4, 2007 Jane Macartney in Beijing Tibet's living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China's atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing's authority over Tibet's restive and deeply Buddhist…

The Quran is bunk, too

I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn't find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the 'science' in the Quran and shows that it's largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen's mistakes, so it's a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage. All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I'm looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only…

Clear Statement About Health Care Coverage

Finally, we have a nice succinct statement from a politician on the subject of health care coverage. I know this is controversial, in the sense that, so far, the mainstream operatives in both major parties reject this.  Still, I truly believe that if most people understood the issue, they would agree with Kucinich.   Most of the stated objections are based upon ideological concerns, totally divorced from any sort of objectivity.  That is the case within the Republican party.   Within the Democratic party, it is probably more accurate to say that it is concern about corporate influence…

Climate Change Emails Scandal of a Physicist Kind

Ha, well, not nearly the soap opera that is the "University of East Anglia" emails, but fun to watch, nonetheless. A letter from American Physical Society president Cherry Murray: Dear APS Member: Recently, you may have received an unsolicited email from Hal Lewis, Bob Austin, Will Happer, Larry Gould and Roger Cohen regarding the APS and climate change. Please be assured that this was not an official APS message, nor was it sent with APS knowledge or approval. A number of members have complained to APS regarding this unsolicited e-mail. If the e-mail addresses used to send this message…

Don't do what on a seesaw?

John, the self-appointed 'Neurosigntist,' turned up this Korean paragon of inscrutably bizarre signage: I can't possibly ask the obvious questions any better than John does: Are women as a group prohibited from using the teeter-totter, or is the sign only prohibiting women dressed in Victorian clothing? Perhaps, the cartoon depicts two witches disguised as 1850's Victorian women using the teeter-totter, in which case, are these witches specifically prohibited from using the equipment? Or, are women dressed in Victorian clothing allowed to use the equipment, regardless of their involvement in…

Savage beauty: Alexander McQueen's anatomical inspirations

Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to "Savage Beauty," there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. "I'm inspired by a feather," McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing--"its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering." --Judith Thurman "Dressed to Thrill," a…

Friday Grey Matters: African Grey Parrots on Stamps

African Grey Parrots are so loved, they've even been honored with stamps in many countries! The stamp on the upper left was a 3 cent stamp issued in Cuba in 1967, one of 15 in a collection of birds in the Havana Zoo. The lower right stamp is from Sierra Leone in Africa, issued in 1999. It was also part of a set of 20 stamps entitled 'Beautiful Parrots and Parakeets of the World.' I once collected stamps as a kid but quit after my precious collection was water-damaged beyond repair. However, these stamps are really beautiful, and I wish I had them! Here's another sheet of parrot stamps with…

Blogger Challenge 2008 sprog thank-you art: dragonflies.

A generous donor who prefers to remain anonymous made a contribution to my challenge and requested some artwork from the sprogs. In particular, the donor requested dragonflies: Many species are considered vulnerable or imperiled by the Nature Conservancy (Species Report Card) and it's my next animal group to target for outreach and conservation. ... Please post the jpg image on your website for awareness of dragonflies... I don't want any recognition for me. Please acknowledge the little artist with teh mad skillz though! We need entomologists to describe and name all the new species we…

ScienceBlogs survey, and an invitation to introduce yourself.

First, from the Seed Overlords: You may have noticed some pretty yellow banner ads around the site this week. They're advertising a huge reader survey that we're conducting right now. Anyone (excepting Seed employees) who fills it out can enter to win an iPod and MacBook Air. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete. Here's the survey page: http://www.erdossurvey.com/sb/survey/ Then, following the lead of Ed, Bora, DrugMonkey, and Alice, I'd like to invite the readers of this blog, from regular commenters to committed lurkers, to check in. Tell us who you are, what brings you here…

I hate to do this...

…but I have to defend Rush Limbaugh. He was detained for having a bottle of Viagra at the airport? What was he going to do, threaten Palm Beach with his little gift from god? I think Limbaugh is a lying hypocritical scumbag, but what alarms me more here is the way airport security and customs has become an arm of fascism: a way to invade the privacy of the individual, all in the name of protecting us from the faceless evil of the other. A guy, I don't care who it is, traveling with one bottle of Viagra is not a threat, and this shouldn't have warranted even a prim finger wagging with eyebrow…

DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: A big shout-out to HP!

About 5 hours ago, "HP from Palo Alto, California" just rocked our world (and helped a bunch of public school classrooms) by plunking down $50 on each of the 13 challenges mounted by ScienceBlogs bloggers in the DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge. That's a total of $650! I'm thinking there's a good chance that the "HP" here is Hewlett-Packard, in which case "Yay!" for the historic high-tech firm finding the ScienceBlogs challenges and supporting them unprompted. But if "HP from Palo Alto, California" is an individual donor, here's a big "Yay!" for that awesome act of individual…

The winners of NCSE's bumper sticker contest

NCSE headquarters was flooded with almost 550 entries from almost 150 people, including sixty entries from a single indefatigable sloganeer. After days of statistical analysis and rigorous peer-review, we are pleased to congratulate the winners -- David Cone, Tom Griffiths, Michael Keller, Tania Lombrozo, Jerry Newton, Bill Pogson, S. Michael Smith, Drew Weller, and a few who preferred not to be identified -- who received such fabulous prizes as a Charles Darwin bobblehead from Southern Illinois University Carbondale's Department of Zoology, a DVD of Greta Schiller's documentary No Dinosaurs…

The wrong reason to get breast implants

I bet that this probably isn't applicable to too many women: One Israeli woman has received an unexpected boost from her breast implants during the Lebanon war -- the silicone embeds saved her life during a Hezbollah rocket attack, a doctor said. "This is an extraordinary case, but it's a fact that the silicone implants prevented her from a more serious and deeper wound," Jacky Govrin, of the hospital in Nahariya that treated the woman, told army radio Tuesday. "The young woman went through surgery two years ago to have a larger chest," he said. "During the war she was wounded in the chest by…

Curate's egg at Science-based Medicine

Mark Hoofnagle reviews a new group blog, Science-Based Medicine. I must say I've loved much of the writing at the new blog Science-Based Medicine. These guys are fighting the good fight and presenting very sophisticated aspects of evaluating the medical literature in a very accessible way. In particular I'd like to point out David Gorski's critique of NCCAM and the directly-relevant articles from Kimball Atwood on the importance of prior probability in evaluating medical research. The writng that Hoofnagle doesn't like are two poorly researched posts from Wallace Sampson, who uncritically…

Lott of the Rings

And, from the surely-it-can't-get-any-weirder department: After John Lott made people promise not to reveal the questions in his new survey, Mary Rosh posted the questions from the new survey to Usenet. I'm imagining it went something like this: Lott: Nasty tricksy bloggers. We hates them, we hates them all. Rosh: No, some bloggers are nice. It's Lindgren we hates. He hurts us with his cruel report. Lott: I'll show them with my Precious survey questions. Keep them secret, we can escape, even from Lambert, eh? Grow strong, eat fish every day. Rosh: No, we should post survey questions…

Venter and Gibson on the Synthetic Genome

There is an interesting and very thoughtful piece by Craig Venter and Daniel Gibson in today's Wall Street Journal going through what their breakthrough is and what it isn't, where they see the project going in the future, and why public discussion is important: [Previous genetic engineers] did not create life in a test tube, nor did we create life from scratch. We transformed existing life into new life. We also did not design and build a new chromosome from nothing. Rather, using only digitized information, we synthesized a modified version of the naturally occurring Mycoplasma mycoides…