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Bill Maher is an astonishingly anti-science anti-vax crank

This week's Realtime with Bill Maher was just about the most perfect example I've seen yet that maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Due to the measles outbreak becoming a hot-button issue, and the realization that his smoldering anti-vaccine denialism would not go over well, our weekly debate host decided to instead unleash all of his other incredibly stupid, unscientific beliefs about medicine. This was astonishing. And because his panel, as usual, is composed largely of political writers and journalists, there was no one to provide a sound scientific counterpoint to the craziness…

Friday Random Ten, 12/18

Naftule's Dream, "Speed Klez": Naftule's Dream is a brilliant progressive klezmer band. I happen to love klezmer, but I think that anyone into jazzy prog rock would also enjoy them. They're terrific. Oregon, "Celeste": Oregon is a band that I can't make up my mind about. They're a jazz trio, with most melodies played by a wonderful oboist. They tend to really push the boundaries - playing with unusual tonalities, really pushing the edge of the envelope with their improvisation. It's quite impressive. And yet, they frequently leave me feeling cold, like there's nothing under…

A Good Road to Drive Fast

I drove down to NYC yesterday to have dinner with some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, and put faces to names. Seven or eight years ago, I probably would've driven back that night, but I'm old and settled, so I shelled out for a hotel room the size of our spare bedroom (maybe 9' square), and drove back this morning. Not to get all Stan Murch on you, but what I did was I got on the West Side Highway, and took that up to the Henry Hudson Parkway, to the Saw Mill Parkway, and then the Taconic State Parkway, which got me all the way back to Albany. It's an old reflex-- the Taconic was the standard…

The unPeople People

Dan Everett, linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker a month ago, gave a talk to Edge, and the transcript is online (the video is still in progress from what I can see). There is a lot of detail there, and most of it is pretty unbelievable to me. I've commented in the past on their supposed immunity to religion. Everett says some more: I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just…

Congrats to Fundamental Physics Prize Winners

Science magazine seemed to imply there was some grousing about the new Fundamental Physics Prizes awarded by billionaire Yuri Milner, but we in Rehovot think it’s a good thing. While one can quibble about which fields are still underfunded, we believe that any support for truly basic research -- the kind whose applications, if they exist, will be decades in the future, but which enlightens today us about the universe we live in – is most welcome. It turns out that  two (at least) of the nine winners have ties to the Weizmann Institute, and, completely by chance, we had recently written about…

ScienceBloggers' Challenge Nets over $30k for DonorsChoose

The ScienceBlogs Donors Choose Challenge officially ended on July 1. By the final count, the ScienceBloggers raised $23,005.16 for educational projects in public-school science teachers' classrooms. The $23,005 will be joined by $10,000 in matching funds donated by Seed. And DonorsChoose has announced that it will reward individual blog challenges that met their funding goals with DonorsChoose gift certificates worth 10% of the amount raised in those challenges, sweetening the pot even more. Nineteen of the ScienceBlogs participated in the funding drive. Six blogs--Pharyngula, The…

Cool linky stuff for science undergrads (12): How to Read & Discuss a Book

I have a son who's currently a physics undergrad, just starting in third year. And another son who's starting first year philosophy. As you can imagine, I may occasionally pass along a link or two to them pointing to stuff on the web I think they might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other undergrad students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog. Since I'm a science librarian, the items I've chosen are mostly geared towards science undergrads (hence, the title of the series…

Support honesty in the climate wars

It would be preferable to simply ignore Christopher Monckton's seemingly laughable attempts to undermine climatology, but given the power of the Internet to turn long-discredited arguments into serious threats to academic freedom, such a strategy would not be wise. Monckton has launched a campaign against John Abraham of St. Thomas University for daring to demolish the former's mendacious presentations on global warming. Abraham's repost is thorough and devastating. So devastating and damaging to Monckton's credibility is it that Monckton is asking for his acolytes to flood the university…

Afghanistan: back where it started

Most Americans think the Afghanistan mistake was the Right Thing to Do. While we are on record (here and here) as of another opinion, the conventional view is that getting rid of the Taliban was Good (they were Bad, which is true) and anyway it was payback for 9/11 (even though the Afghans didn't actually commit 9/11, only were the geographic location of the planner -- thanks to US aid when bin Laden was fighting the Soviets. Now Pakistan is where the 9/11 leaders live (not to mention that the actual perpetrators, who mostly came from Saudi). You fill in the rest. Still, few agree with us.…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Lifeless Cells Ensure Sharp Vision: Seemingly dead cells perform a surprising task in the lens of a fish eye. Every morning and evening they change the lens's capacity to refract light in order to enhance color perception during the day and night vision when it's dark. This is shown in new research from Lund University in Sweden. Lice Genomes Uniquely Fragmented: How Did It Evolve?: Parents and school nurses take note. Lice are a familiar nuisance around the world and vectors of serious diseases, such as epidemic typhus, in developing regions. New research indicates that lice may actually…

Education 2.0

At the Western RCAC Symposium last week: Rodd Lucier: Fertilizing the Grass Roots: My personal suspicions are that most attendees will fail to make effective use of any of the many tools introduced today. Even with everyone recognizing that we have a long way to go: A significant knowing-doing gap will remain! David Warlick: So Now What Do We Do?: Then Rodd listed some comments that he overheard during the conference, that support his concern. I'm listing them here and will try to make some suggestions that may be useful. My suggestions are indented just a bit to better distinguish them…

Tweetlinks, 9-23-09

Triangle is first stop in U.S. global health revamp CNN's New Journalism Strategy: Out-Dumbass The Internet (video) Why Fall Colors Are Different in U.S. and Europe Cartooning Evolution Home, 1861-1925 - awesome evolution-themed cartoons from old newspapers. UNC pharmacy prof Stephen Frye on Ernie Hood's Radio In Vivo today at noon EDT on WCOM-FM Survey of Healthcare in America and an Argument for Change The once-quiet scientist - A former animal researcher decides to speak out. The Obama Roadblock: Why He's Sagging Online The wrong way to do it - Graphing data on healthcare on TV - inept or…

Journals - the dinosaurs of scientific communication

Bjoern Brembs: Today's system of scientific journals started as a way to effectively use a scarce resource, printed paper. Soon thereafter, the publishers realized there were big bucks to be made and increased the number of journals to today's approx. 24,000. Today, there is no technical reason any more why you couldn't have all the 2.5 million papers science puts out every year in a single database. --------snip-------- Precurser to this publishing reform was access reform: scientific papers are the result of publicly funded research and should be publicly accessible. This reform appears now…

Science Blogging Conference

I don't have to remind you every day, but behind the scenes, we are busily working on the organization of the 2nd Science Blogging Conference. The organizing committee is meeting on Thursday and I'll report on any news and updates then. The new wiki is almost all set up (and it will be updated on Thursday as well). One of the pages we have not moved yet from the old to the new wiki is this one, a list of resources for finding science blogs, as well as a list of blogs that showcases the diversity of the scientific blogosphere and serves as an entry point into it without being too…

120% APR

I was at a local bank this week, depositing a check from a solvent institution but one known to have cash flow issues it is a large west coast bank, relatively well known including for some recent financial games with the Feds. This time, the nice lady at the counter asked me if I needed immediate access to the deposit? Huh? Said I. Looking at the payeee - "I think the check will clear..." Oh, it is not that, said she, it is just that some people need immediate access to their deposits, like same day, or tomorrow, and if you did we can expedite it. Oh, that's nice, thought I, and said "no…

Not an “accident”: Selvin Lopez-Castillo, 43, suffers fatal work-related injury in Franklin Township, NJ

Selvin Antulio Lopez-Castillo, 43, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, May 4, 2015 while working at a residential construction site in Franklin Township, NJ. ABCNews reports: The incident occurred around 4 pm at a site where a home was under construction. Five other workers were nearby when the incident occurred. NBCNY reports: “The worker was about 8 feet down when the walls of the hole gave way. The other workers attempted to get him out but were unsuccessful.” “Firefighters from Community, East Franklin, Somerset Fire and Rescue and New Brunswick Fire responded to the scene.…

Tech Note: Android Smartphone

I recently switched from a 2008 smartphone running Windows Mobile to a Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica that runs the open-source operating system Android put out by Google. Here are some impressions after two weeks of use. I really miss the old phone's hardware keyboard. Typing on the touch screen is slow and error-prone, especially since the Swedish layout has to cram in three extra keys. And for some reason the Swedish dictionary never makes any word suggestions. What's up with that? Everything is so much prettier under Android than under the 2008 version of Windows Mobile. The web browser…

Follow Up on Carruthers' Arrest

CNN carried the story of the arrest of BetOnSports.com CEO David Carruthers and it adds some detail. This was not a spur of the moment decision, this was planned out. Carruthers was in custody in Fort Worth, Texas, after a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Missouri returned a 22-count indictment charging 11 individuals and four corporations on various charges of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. The founder of BETonSPORTS.com, Gary Stephen Kaplan, 47, was also charged with 20 felony violations of federal laws, it said. A…

Interactive Graphic: growing fossil fuel reserves v. shrinking global carbon budget

This just in: New Oil Change International interactive graphic shows growing fossil fuel reserves in contrast to shrinking global carbon budget WASHINGTON, DC – New analysis by Oil Change International shows that global fossil fuel reserves continue to expand while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific and industry analysts repeatedly show that our remaining budget for burning fossil fuels has shrunk to less than one third of existing reserves. The Oil Change analysis shows that fossil fuel companies gained access to more than twice as much in fossil fuels as they…

Racist Detectorists

In countries with a big metal detector hobby, the stereotypical participant is an anorak-wearing, rural, poorly educated, underemployed male. I don't know how true this cliché image is. But apart from the anorak, it's certainly an accurate description of the core voter demographic behind the rise of racist right-wing populist parties. These people have trouble finding jobs, and they have trouble seeing through the racist propaganda that tells them they would have jobs and girlfriends if it weren't for the bloody furriners. I'm known as a detectorist-friendly archaeologist. I've made many…

Americans United for Separation of Church & State OKC: Second Annual Hot-Button Debate

Second Annual Hot-Button Debate The Oklahoma City chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State will host its second annual hot-button debate on Thursday, March 15, 2012, starting at 7:00pm and ending by 8:30pm. The location will be on the campus of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC)... The debaters will be Abbie Smith voicing opposition to the resolution: "Intelligent Design should be taught in public school science classrooms". Debating in favor of the resolution will be Dr. Steve Kern of Olivet Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. http://www.olivetbaptistokc.com/ That…

Fornvännen's Winter Issue

The winter issue of Fornvännen (2006:5) came from the printers yesterday. Some of the boxes were all wet after some talented individual had put them in a puddle, but most were fine. Here's the contents. Andreas Nordberg and Roger Wikell of Stockholm present observations from unexcavated 1st Millennium AD cemeteries south of Stockholm, indicating that there may be Migration Period chamber graves there. This challenges the prevailing impression that such graves for some reason avoid Södermanland, the province south of Lake Mälaren. Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who recently got her PhD in…

Links for 2010-01-09

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley "Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school--like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood--don't seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling--like a teacher's extracurricular accomplishments in college--tend to…

Data or Dust Speck?

Shortly after the invention of the laser, a torrent of discoveries began pouring in thanks to the previously unreachable intensities that became available. Many of these discoveries fall under the general category of "nonlinear optics", which you could more or less say is the study of the behavior of light in a medium whose optical properties are themselves a function of the light intensity. Pretty much all material exhibit nonlinear optical effects if the light is intense enough, but "intense enough" is frequently in the neighborhood of 10^20 watts per square meter. Once lasers were invented…

Unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

On April 24, investigative reporter Brooks Jackson and UPenn professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson are set to release a new book that is sure to be of interest to Framing Science readers...from the news release: Friday, March 30, 2007 UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, a new book described as "the secret decoder ring for the 21st-century world of disinformation," will officially be released by Random House on April 24. Co-authored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the paperback lays bare the art of spinning - rampant in the world of…

Gene therapy cures dogs of type 1 diabetes

Image of beagle from www.dogbreedinfo.com/beagle.htm Diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar. The cause of high blood sugar differs for people with type 1 versus type 2 diabetes. For type 1 diabetics, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone responsible for lowering blood sugar. For type 2 diabetics, tissues in the body are not responsive to insulin, termed insulin resistance, resulting in persistently elevated blood sugar. Muscle tissue is the main site of glucose disposal in the body and therefore, the main site of insulin's action. Researchers from Universitat…

The day's gleanings

Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller. Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, "It's often my first stop -- never my last." Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl's Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass. A new…

King of Sushi in a Coffin

Last night 60 minutes aired a special on the King of Sushi, now available online. The presenter begins in Toykyo's Tsukiji market--a $4 billion per year fisheries trading post that Harvard anthropologist Ted Bestor describes as the "Wall Street of fish with no futures market." They watch as one 450-lb. bluefin is brought in its 'tuna coffin' (see image) and then sold for $8500. But where is the tuna coming from? Next stop is the Mediterranean to witness the Mattanza or annual tuna slaughter. The tonnaras, a complex system of nets to catch tuna as well as a thousand-year-old right of…

"How We Decide" - the thinking person's "Blink"

The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace? "How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…

Covering Hurricanes and Global Warming--A Mooney-Nisbet Special

Over at Skeptical Inquirer online, two of your ScienceBlogs denizens have teamed up in a major article about the pitfalls in the way the press covers the issue of hurricanes and global warming. And this isn't simply some pat story about avoiding robotic "balance" in coverage, such as one might tell about reporting on evolution or reporting the basic issue of whether we're causing global warming. Matt's and my argument is much complex and nuanced this time, because the subject requires it: Although journalists have framed the story from three main angles--an emphasis on breaking scientific…

Dawkins' online debate

Some good news: the online 'debate' between Dawkins and the religion editors of the Times can be read for free. It's a terrible format: it's just a chat window with people throwing questions at Dawkins, which he deftly slices out of the air with a samurai sword of reason. Here's one of the more coherent questions the pro-faith gummi bears tossed at him, which will give you an idea of the quality of the interrogation. I just interviewed David Wilkinson, principal of St John's Durham and astrophysicist, and this is what he said (full interview at my Times blog Articles of Faith): The science…

Science Policy and the Candidates: How Do We Know What We Know (And Why Doesn't Anybody Else Know It)?

Recently, my inbox has been filling up with emails about new online resources that bring you up to speed on the science policy positions of the candidates. The AAAS has a website, as does Popular Mechanics, Physics Today, and Scientists and Engineers for America (the SHARP Network, which also looks at congressional candidate science policies). And I'm sure there are other ones out there that I've simply missed. In my latest Science Progress column, though, I canvass these sites and find, understandably, that most are based on information from campaign websites, candidate speeches, press…

Small Brain - Normal Life

As reported in the journal, The Lancet, a man has been found who had a small brain, but a normal life.  The article is subscription only so I am not even going to link to it.  But it is still noteworthy.     There is a fair summary in the online version of href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,495607,00.html">Der Spiegel, and it is even in English.  It describes the case of a 44-year-old man employed in a tax office.  He was married, father of two, holding down a job, seemingly fine.  In 2003 he noticed some weakness in his left leg.  He ultimately was seen by Dr…

Rover Finds Evidence Related to Life-Friendly Environments on Mars

Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists. An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid. The ancient water indicated by this find was not acidic. NASA's rovers have found other evidence of formerly wet Martian environments. However the data for those environments indicate conditions that may have been acidic…

Science Blogging Event in London this Thursday

The Royal Institution, in conjunction with Nature Network, is sponsoring a program on science blogging this Thursday (28 February): Blogging science Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong Thursday 28 February 2008 7.00pm-8.30pm What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them. There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round news or analysis,…

Jay Rosen: Blogs Do Quality Reporting Too

In response to Michael Skube's freewheelingly critical opinion piece about the blogosphere in Sunday's LA Times, the paper has published a response entitled "The journalism that bloggers actually do" by Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger, via its online Blowback feature. For more information on the Skube affair, check out A Blog Around the Clock. I don't have a problem with Skube's assertion that blogs are no substitute for the mainstream media--I agree--but Skube is just so contemptuous and dismissive toward the blogosphere (a phenomenon he doesn't seem particularly…

What to do with Your Negative Results

My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the animals to replicate the experiments (and I was planning on doing some similar experiments) so my advisor had me perform the crosses. I ended up with a negative result -- I did not see the same trends that Dobzhanksy and colleagues observed. I guess you could say my negative result was a positive…

Mind Control around the world

After a previous post about mind control devices I received an interesting email from Catherine Heywood of the British Mind Control Network. It's a shame that "The British Mind Control Network (BMCN) is an online resource at present but hopes to become so within the next three years" I'm sure there would be some pretty interesting reading on that site to say the least. Get that website up Catherine! In any case, it seems that there is some serious mind control going on in Britain and elsewhere ;) See below the fold for some details - and the document I received. The British are…

Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, endorses Obama

Francis Collins, the former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and lead on the Human Genome Project has just published an opinion piece in the Virginian Pilot endorsing Barack Obama. Unfortunately the Pilot does not post their guest opinion pieces online, but a good friend in Virginia scanned a copy in for me. It is not a great quality scan, but it is good enough to read. What is striking to me about it is not just that a rather apolitical scientist of his stature came out to endorse Obama, but that he did it in a Virginia paper with far less profile than he could have…

I'm moving to Discover

Update your bookmarks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp And RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog If you have a weblog that links to ScienceBlogs GNXP, I would appreciate you update the link for the sake of PageRank. There isn't much to say about the move. There wasn't one big precipitating reason, a variety of reasons coalesced to make this the right thing to do for me. I would like to give a shout out to Erin Johnson, who from what I recall has been the longest serving ScienceBlogs community manager in the history of the website. One bittersweet aspect of leaving the…

"What do you think, sirs?"

Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I having something of an affinity for cheesy B-movies. I probably acquired the taste during childhood, when Jaws II, III, IV, and most of the Godzilla series would be playing on any given weekend, and even though I would be hard pressed to give any of the movies more than 2 stars out of 5 I do like turning down the lights, grabbing some popcorn, and sitting down to watch something that I know is going to be nearly painfully bad. There are a few exceptions, a few creature features that stand out from the rest (i.e. Alligator, The Host), but by and…

How tall is that UFO?

You know I wander around the intertubes, right? Who doesn't? Anyway, I saw this collection of strange google Earth images. Yeah, it is kind of dumb, but this one made me think: That article said the image was from TechEBlog, so there is that. I have no idea what this thing is, but it is clearly tall. How tall? Instead of searching online for info about this structure (that wouldn't be any fun), I figured I could do a quick analysis of the shadow. Here we go. First, I need to make some measurements. It turns out that Tracker Video tool for analysis is also quite excellent to use for…

Whitman and Neuroscience

I'll be away from my desk tomorrow, so I thought I'd keep you entertained with a video of me. (Forgive the shameless self-promotion.) In this short video, I'm discussing how Walt Whitman anticipated some truths of modern neuroscience. (I've written a whole book on this subject, which will come out this fall.) To be honest, I have yet to watch the video. I just find it too painfully embarrassing*. For those who just want the knowledge without suffering through my voice and nervous bodily tics, here's a short summary of the talk cribbed from my book: Whitman was the first poet to write poems in…

The Spiritual Brain

I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable. The writing is aggravating. It is constantly broken up with strings of quotes — 3, 4, 5, or 6 at a time — that are just plopped out there to speak for themselves, and often the authors don't even bother to address the points brought up in the quotes. It's…

Friday Recipe: Real Fried Rice

One of the staples of chinese cooking is fried rice. Unfortunately, what we get in American restaurants when we order fried rice is dreadful stuff. The real thing is absolutely wonderful - and very different from the American version. The trick to getting the texture of the dish right is to use leftover rice. Freshly cooked rice won't work; you need it to dry out bit. So cook some other chinese dish one night, make an extra 2 cups of rice, and then leave it in the fridge overnight. If you can, take it out of the fridge a couple of hours before you're going to cook, to get it to room…

It's Not Like the Suffragists At All

Yesterday, PZ and Amanda both argued that a model for the acceptance of atheists should be the suffragist movement. I think that's the wrong model: the appropriate model is the mainstreaming of Jews into American society. Overall, despite an incident in Delaware, Jews have entered mainstream society quite well: if polls are to be believed, we are less likely to be discriminated against electorally than evangelicals (although maybe that's just a respect for our innate business acumen). But around sixty to seventy years ago, that wasn't the case. Jews were routinely discriminated against,…

Big Sh-tpile Was Not Complicated or Unpredicted

In fact, it didn't even require much in the way of theory. As financial reform legislation moves its way through the legislative process, we're going to hear a lot of claims along the line of "No one could have predicted this." Which makes me wonder if we're going to militarily occupy Wall Street for a decade too. Of course, this is bullshit, and economist Dean Baker calls out this ersatz 'consensus': Yeah, it's all really really complicated. Except it isn't. Nationwide house prices had diverged from a 100-year long trend, increasing by more than 70 percent in real terms. There was no…

Do We Need An Anti-Creationist Think-Tank?

Two years (January 28, 2005) have passed, but I am still not sure what the correct answer to this question is: --------------------------------------- ( Image: Sexism and Creationism , thanks All-Knowing Orac) Previously, I have made a comparison between the challenges facing the reality-based community in politics and the challenges facing the reality-based community in science (some of it perhaps related to the underlying idea of the image above). Not everyone appeared to have liked it, as this guy who is "a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan" wrote this in response. I…

Please learn from my mistake

Quick trip to California, and between life, the neighbours dogs, and a late connection I was drive to the ultimate in desperation... I bought one of the "snack boxes" on United Airlines. The "healthy" one. Judging by the state of the contents, I was the only customer dumb enough to actually buy one this month. Though it had not quite hit the expiry date, I checked. Anyway, you expect the crackers to be stale, but the rest was basically a tin of cat food and a jar of baby food. Suspicously mouldy looking baby food. Ok, the mini-toblerone was ok, hard to go wrong there. You have been warned.…

Weekend Diversion: Rorschach In Real Life!

"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me! " -Rorschach, from Watchmen One of the best graphic novels I've ever read is Watchmen, created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. (Decent movie, too.) One of the things that struck me most about it is how fatalistic and, in many ways, hopeless it all seems. To set the mood this week, I give you Ben Harper's melancholic song, Widow Of A Living Man.With a slew of well-developed, major characters, a case can be made for any number of them as either the most heroic or villainous; in my case…