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Projection, fear, and sex: An evolutionary psychology explanation of a Freudian phenomenon

You're at a bar, club, or church social and you've just met an absolutely stunning member of the opposite sex. You're single and available, and you detect no signs of romantic commitment in your new conversation-partner. Could he/she be interested in you too? Or you're walking down a poorly-lit street in an unfamiliar city. It's 11:30 p.m., you're alone, and there are no signs of activity other than the occasional passing car. Suddenly you notice a large man emerge from an alleyway ahead of you and stride purposely in your direction. Is he a threat? In situations such as these, you'd probably…

ADVANCing along with the big kids: my tentative first foray into BIGGRANTDOM

Okay, so I've been keeping this under my hat for the last six-eight months, scared of jinxing things, but it's becoming arduous to keep hiding, so I'm sharing. Purdue submitted a proposal in December for an NSF-ADVANCE institutional transformation grant - the purpose of these grants are to improve the lot for and of women in science and engineering academia, particularly faculty positions. I'm listed as a co-PI on Purdue's grant. NSF hasn't awarded anything yet, so we are in official limbo, waiting for word. However, the waiting game has now bumped into the annual ADVANCE PI meeting,…

Fake Poster Trilogy: Cingular Theory of Unification

Along with Shelley, I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at UM. The last three years my friends and I have made a trilogy of satirical neuroscience posters (see the first one here) poking mild fun at the mystical art of brain science. Also in any spare time remaining I have punished myself with some rather difficult neural engineering experiments. Year 1, on the Stock Market and Rat Neurons, is already posted on Shelley's blog here. Year 2, on "How many Neurons Must One Man Have, before You Call Him a Man" will be posted shortly, as the story is unfinished on that bit of…

Can Manatees and Humans Coexist, And Why Do I Care?

I grew up in Florida, in central Florida to be exact. As a kid we went to Blue Springs and other manatee havens on field trips, to observe these gentle and curious animals. They are huge, and as they tend to inhabit shallow areas of the Florida coastal waterways its easy to see them in the clear springs of Florida, and even swim with them in some cases (not recommended, as you may inadvertently injure them). In the 1980s and 1990s, when i lived there (before I went back for undergrad) manatee conservation was forefront. They were nearly gone; hunted to the brink of extinction in the earlier…

Orphan Books: Is Google Robbing the Warehouse?

It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…

See no evil: How to destroy your photojournalistic credibility in nothing flat

(1) John McCain, photographed for the Atlantic Monthly, 2008; (2) inset: Atlantic Monthly cover, October 2008; (3) monkey portrait. Photographer: Jill Greenberg All of these portraits are by Jill Greenberg, but one of them is getting a bit more attention than the others. Guess which! Before this week, Greenberg may have been best known for her "monkey portrait" series, which was recently released as a book. When I saw them here at the National Academies last spring, I was delighted by the remarkably human expressions she coaxed out of the primates. The portraits seemed like an idealistic…

Teh rules: FTC says bloggers must disclose free goodies

So it's finally happened: the government is taking blogs so seriously that the FTC is cracking down on us! As you may have heard, Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.The agency, charged with protecting consumer interests, had not updated its policy on endorsements in nearly three decades, well before the Internet became a force in shaping consumer tastes. The new rules attempt to make more transparent corporate payments to…

Is It Ethical? Mentally Handicapped Child Frozen in Time By Surgery

Although I thought about making a post about the refusal of the corrupt earmark system to just die already, I think something more in my scope of interest is the current ethics debate regarding a severely mentally handicapped child. Specifically, her parents have opted to surgically stunt their child's physical development to prevent puberty (hormones, menstruation, growth, etc) and to keep her weight at a level that they can manage. She is currently 9 years old, and has the mental capacity of a 3 month baby--she can only lie on her back and kick her legs/arms around. She relies on her…

Ambidextrous More Likely To Be Bisexual; Why Do We Care, Anyway?

Ambidextrous More Likely To Be Bisexual; Why Do We Care, Anyway?   A new study coming from the href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/" rel="tag">University of Guelph.   href="http://www.psychology.uoguelph.ca/d_faculty/peters.html">Dr. Michael Peters, a neuropsychologist, analyzed a survey of about 255,000 people, and come up with some interesting findings about human sexuality.  Among them, is the observation that bisexuality was  significantly more common in ambidextrous persons: href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/06-12-06/featureshand.shtml">On the Other Hand Study refutes…

IGERT meeting: what do grown-up interdisciplinary scientists do for a living?

One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful. The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the…

The Kitty of Doom

This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of Death should in fact be a cat, although, oddly enough, not a black cat: Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, though morbid talent - predicting when patients will die. When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours. Such is Oscar's apparent accuracy - 25 consecutive cases so far…

Another clean kill by chelation

Somehow this one passed under my radar four years ago. However, the there's a reason for this. First, I wasn't blogging then and thus wasn't paying as close attention to alternative medicine. Also, apparently, the State of Oregon didn't know about it until 16 months after the fact, which was still before I started blogging. In any case, behold the sad case of Sandy Boylan: Sandy Boylan was a contagiously cheerful woman whose hobby was handing out bouquets of homegrown flowers. But in the summer of 2003, she was scared. The 53-year-old B&B owner from Dallas, Ore., had been told by her…

Doctor Strange: The only way to make homeopathy work

It would appear that I must respectfully disagree (or be Respectfully Insolent, if you will) with fellow comic fan Scott over at Polite Dissent. Two of my all-time favorite comics are Fantastic Four and (believe it or not, given my present day disdain for woo) Doctor Strange. Doctor Stephen Strange, for those of you not familiar with him, started out as an incredibly arrogant and greedy neurosurgeon who was involved in an auto accident in which he suffered nerve damage to his hands that impaired the fine motor control to the point where, while he could function normally in every day life, he…

Science proves that your friends are more important than you!

Editor's Selection IconThe other day a friend of mine bumped into some news that concerned her. She could have asked a random person about this to find out more information, but there was a bit of information that came with the news indicating that I might know more than the average person about it. So, she asked me, and as it turns out, I did not know anything. But, having heard the news from her, I noticed a different bit of information that came along with it that told me exactly who would know everything about it, so I sent along a question .... "What's going on with the [deleted]?" I…

Pete Seeger joins the Nature Conservation Club (NCC)

... continued The flames were so hot that we could feel it on our faces over 300 feet away as we stood near the corner of Delaware and Whitehall avenues. At first we gawked at the burning factory from about 100 feet away, but a large explosion caused us all to turn and run. But not too far. While watching from some 200 feet away, the police came by and pushed us back to the 300 foot mark just before several explosions in a row came along. The stuff that came down on us out of the sky was cooled enough to not burn, and some of the bits were recognizable as small fragments of colored…

The Nematode Vulva and the Nature of Evolution

The question is basic: Is evolutionary change largely random or is it more often shaped by selective forces? The former is linked to what is called Neutral Theory, and it has a lot of support, to the extent that it most likely true. The latter is part of what is sometimes known as the Adaptationist Program, and it is certainly correct. New research on the Development of the Nematode Vulva is sure to cloud the issue even further.. First, a word on this confusing introduction. We know that when we observe life, we do not see a really wide range of degree of adaptation among closely related…

Homeopathy kills a child

Homeopathy is water. Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water "memory," which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it "remembers" the remedy with which it's been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there's likely to be even one molecule of it left. Not only that, but they will, in all seriousness, tell you that dilution is not enough. They will insist that, at each serial dilution, the remedy must be vigorously shaken (or, as they call it, "succussed") in order to imbue it with its…

"We support Dr. Andrew Wakefield"?

Alright, I know that, after yesterday's epic post (which was long even by Orac-ian standards), I said that I was going to try to get away from vaccine blogging for a while. I lied. Well, not really. At that time I really did mean it. But then I came across something that I just couldn't leave alone. Regular readers of this blog know my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, namely that he is a fraud, a quack, a charlatan, and a danger to the health of autistic children and public health in general. There is, as documented in my post and elsewhere, abundant evidence to support my opinion. But apparently…

Adolf, can you hear me?

Since I started this blog, I've become aware of all sorts of weirdness and woo. One special category of woo that irritates me is psychics, particularly the ones who claim that they can contact the dead, like Sylvia Browne or John Edward. They are arguably the worst kind of "psychic," usually using cold reading or some variation of it to take advantage on the hopes of people desperately missing their loved ones who died. Sometimes, however, I learn of a self-styled "psychic" who's so off the wall that my revulsion wrestles with my bemusement, and it's not clear which will win. This is one such…

John Berlau, quote doctor

Glenn Reynolds endorses a post by John Berlau who accuses environmentalists of making racist comments like Don Imus. Berlau gives five examples and Berlau is deceptive in each and every one of them. Environmentalists must be completely non-racist if Berlau can't make a case without resorting to quote doctoring. The most outrageous environmentalist comment Berlau offers is this: Charles Wurster, co-founder and former chief scientist of Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense): When asked about human deaths that would result from the banning of DDT, due to exposure to more…

Pinata whacking not outsourced

Commentator 1: Hello, and welcome to a special Good Friday edition of INTELLECTUAL CAGE MATCH. Today we have a great match up for you. The topic is Global Warming and it's the collective wisdom of Tim Blair's commenters against Ryan Gwin, who is six. Commentator 2: Ooh, that's not fair. Commentator 1: I know, but we couldn't find any four year olds who wanted to take them on. But Team Blair has been training hard so we may have a contest here. Here's hollingshead on their training program: Hence why I stock up on Tim Ball videos. C2: Ooh, they might sue Ryan if they lose. I remember…

Short scientific talks for dummies

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

A Few Questions and Answers on Reye's Sydrome

Karen Starko writes: Several basic questions related to Reye's syndrome (RS) have come to me from readers of Mark's book, Inside the Outbreaks. These show the importance of continued education on health issues. (For example, some physicians thought that fever was essential to getting RS). Again, thanks to Mark Pendergrast for a wonderful addition to our public health knowledge. Is an influenza or chickenpox infection necessary to acquire RS? The answer is no. RS generally has two phases: the antecedent illness and usually, within a few days of this, the syndrome of vomiting and…

When homeopaths kill by neglect

Busy, busy, busy. Between work and getting ready to for the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle on Thursday as I mentioned on Monday, I'm afraid I don't have time for my usual sterling gems of skeptically insolent prose or an analysis of a scientific paper that a couple of my readers have sent me. If too many science or medical bloggers haven't totally deconstructed it by then, maybe I'll take it on either on Friday or Monday. Until then, if you haven't gotten me an entry to the Skeptics' Circle yet, you still have about 12 hours left until the deadline at 6 PM EST. In the meantime, that…

Saturday Review: The Inflammasome!

This week, I'm going to take a break from vaccines and do some innate immunity. Today's topic: the provocatively named "Inflammasome." This Nature Review from last month focused on inflammasomes and anti-viral immunity, but I think the inflammasome itself needs its own post. A breakthrough in our understanding of the mechanisms that control the activation of inflammatory caspases came from the identification and characterization of the inflammasome, a large (~700 kDa) multiprotein complex that recruits inflammatory caspases and triggers their activation. Inflammasomes are often defined by…

Destiny; a Manifestation

American Progress by John Gast Take note of the bison in the painting above, fleeing from America’s angel of death, a now-fallen angel named Manifest Destiny.Take note of the bison, fleeing alongside horseback-riding natives and dwindling wildlife.Take note of the bison, pressed ever-more westward towards a finite boundary, towards the Pacific Ocean. Now, notice the complete lack of fences. Destiny, in the painting above, carries a reel of telegraph wire, but I can’t help but see it as barbed wire. Sure, this picture was trying to depict civilization as this beautiful, progressive thing,…

Richard Nixon Tamed the Mole People! A Timeline of Global Seismic Energy Release

I've finally read Dr. Tom Chalko's wackaloon manuscript. It was fantastic. Chalko artfully combines common misconceptions about his subject matter with accessible yet impressively mathy-lookin' slipshod data analysis, and produces an argument that appeals to the innate human desire to make sense of the natural world. His skill at subtly invoking people's fear of a changing world and appropriating the power of existing cultural narratives - in this case, the discourse on climate change - places him among the crackpot screed-writing elite. That makes it worth discussing a few of his more…

Campaign Blogging: Fundamentally Different From Everyday Political Blogging

Last week, I attended a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute presented by J. Ignacio Criado and entitled "Political Blogging in Campaign and Political Communication: Political Leadership 2.0?" (see my announcement and the event's abstract here). My impressions are mixed, particularly in relation to the relevance of the seminar and the methods and conclusions of the presenter. I'll touch on these methodological issues briefly, but the main point that I took home was this: campaign blogging is fundamentally different from everyday political blogging, and it doesn't truly fit into the…

The Difference Between Edwards and Romney

I've been openly skeptical of the shift to the right that we've seen lately by those vying for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Although my skepticism is targeted more at the inevitable swing to the center that their rhetoric will surely take after the primaries (despite the continued influence that the right wing voters courted now will continue to have if one of them is elected president), it's only fair to address the obvious question: should we be as skeptical of those on the Democratic side? Although we have not seen as stark a shift in the front runners on the Democratic…

To Catch A Cat, You Need To Fry A Chicken

Whether you're a dog, a cat, or a grad student who hasn't been home to shower for a few days, fleas are a major problem. They make skin itch. And NOTHING is worse than itchy skin. But... Do you know WHERE the fleas are? Where they like to hang out and guard their little flea eggs? Where's the best place for a flea to get a decent night's sleep, or a delicious snack? These are important questions. Lucky for us, Hsu, Hsu, and Wu of the Department of Entomology at National Taiwan University have the answers. And this paper, dear readers, is pure blogging GOLD. Now, if you wanted to find out…

How to Walk into a Seminar Late

I was sitting in a small seminar today (about 20 people in a conference room) when someone walked in about 10 minutes late for the talk. This didn't bother the presenter, and I'm not even sure if everyone saw this person walk in (I was sitting particularly close to the door). It wasn't that she was walking into the seminar late that bothered me -- we all get caught up doing things only to realize that we nearly missed an appointment -- but how she walked in. I'm sure everyone has walked into a talk after it has begun, and, depending on whether it's a lab meeting, departmental seminar, or…

The Nematode Vulva and the Nature of Evolution

The question is basic: Is evolutionary change largely random or is it more often shaped by selective forces? The former is linked to what is called Neutral Theory, and it has a lot of support, to the extent that it most likely true. The latter is part of what is sometimes known as the Adaptationist Program, and it is certainly correct. New research on the Development of the Nematode Vulva is sure to cloud the issue even further... First, a word on this confusing introduction. We know that when we observe life, we do not see a really wide range of degree of adaptation among closely…

Truths and Consequences

There are two reasons that the Republicans "won" the house and took more senate seats. One of them was made clear last night at dinner. Our waitress was funny. She started out a little funny-strange, then went to funny-ha ha, and I left the restaurant liking her and wishing more people were mostly like her. The funny-strange bit derived from her thoughtful pauses following certain questions like "do you have vegetables" and "you are out of my favorite beer, what should I drink" and so on. It turns out that we were pretty nearly her first customers ever, and she was hiding her nervousness…

What do you do when you hit on a girl in a bar and she's not interested?

One possibility would be to get stinking drunk, then later, find her and her male companion and run them over with your car. At this point, we can't be sure that this is what happened, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that this may have been the nature of Kandyce Stoffel's tragic death Monday in Minneapolis. Kandyce was a student at UMN, about to graduate, and the driver, John Robert Peterson, a high school tennis coach. One other person was hurt in the incident. The only reason I even know about this is because I've been doing something unusual (for me ... these days) ...…

Pagel on Darwin

Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question: a repost How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems…

I-35: God's Personal Highway

And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it." -Isaiah 35:8 A Repost So, I'm having dinner over at Lynn Fellman Studios with Lynn, Genie Scott of NCSE who is in town for a conference, and a variety of friends and colleagues including the recently decorated Randy Moore. And I bring up the idea that I 35 ... the main north-south interstate through the Twin Cities, the one with the recent bridge collapse, is seen by some crazy religious people as a special…

From Fit to Fat to Fit: Into the bush

Obsession can be a good thing. And I'm not talking about some dumb-ass fragrance. ... continued ... Stuck in the field without a gym for three weeks was going to be tough, but I worked out two ways to stay in shape. First, every time we were in a city with a gym, Lynne got me into the gym, and my field crew usually came along as well. Lynne knew all the gyms and all the people who worked in all the gyms, and generally had the ability to make things happen. This mainly occurred in the city of Kimberly ... which actually has a very nice gym ... but I also worked out in Pretoria and…

Cost and service models for data curation

In many of the data-curation talks and discussions I've attended, a distinction has been drawn between Big Science and small science, the latter sometimes being lumped with humanities research. I'm not sure this distinction completely holds up in practice—are the quantitative social sciences Big or small? what about medicine?—but there's definitely food for thought there. Big Science produces big, basically homogeneous data from single research projects, on the order of terabytes in short timeframes. For Big Data, building enough reliable storage is a big deal; it's hard to even look at the…

John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts Says...

It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this: In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place." At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…

Talking Science Integrity at AGU

At what point is the science certain enough on an issue? Is there a line of policy involvement that scientists shouldn't cross? What will the new Congress mean for science and scientists? These were some of the questions aired at science integrity-related events at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting on Tuesday. At the morning discussion "Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century," panelists tackled the personal, the political, and much in between. Later in the day, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) sponsored a workshop for…

Legal thuggery, antivaccine edition, part 3: Andrew Wakefield rallying the troops

I realize I've already written two posts about Andrew Wakefield suing investigative journalist Brian Deer, the first one pointing out how it's just another example of cranks trying to silence criticism not through producing good science to defend their views but rather through abusing legal process and starting frivolous libel suits, the second one pointing out a connection between Andrew Wakefield and Autism Trust USA that might indicate how Wakefield is getting cash to pay for this lawsuit. Through it all, I've asked one question: Why is Wakefield doing it? Well, as part of the legal…

Green light for teaching creationism in public schools?

[Repost with minor modifications form gregladen.com] width="250"/> As indicated in a press release by the National Center for Science Education, the National Council for the Social Studies has released a position statement on Intelligent Design. ...There have been efforts for many decades to introduce religious beliefs about the beginning of life on Earth into the science curriculum of the public schools. Most recently, these efforts have included "creation science" and "intelligent design." Following a number of court decisions finding the teaching of creationism and intelligent design…

Sizzle

"Like we really really want to make this film and we feel really passionate about global warming and feel really upset by it. We just don't know why." The tone of that opening statement resonates throughout the film. Randy Olson, of the Shifting Baselines blog and Flock of Dodos fame, set to create a "global warming comedy". He wanted to understand the debate raging on between scientists and global warming skeptics. Is it a failure of scientists to communicate on the level of your everyday individual? If that statement speaks for the general non-scientific audience of the United States, then…

Death of a Bridge

When my mother was a little girl, my grandfather would drive her - almost all the way - to the dentist in Point Marion, PA. They would stop and park on the Greene County side of this bridge, and walk across to save the ten-cent toll on cars. Money was that tight. Mom always said it was bad enough to have to go to the dentist without having to walk across that bridge in the bargain. The bridge is just a few years younger than my mother, and you can see in the photo, which I took last week, that it is not in very good shape. It was already not in very good shape when I was a young girl…

Late Sunday sermon: Tolerance, politics and religion

Sandy Levinson tackles the issue of Religion and politics after reading Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael Honey: Almost every single chapter of Honey's book makes clear, once more, the absolute centrality of churches to the civil rights (and labor) movement in Memphis. This is most obvious with regard to African-American churches. King was only the most famous "reverend" to play a key role in the Movement. But there are also the white clergy (and rabbi); usually, they were pusillanimous and hesitant to move more than a step or two…

Lactase persistence and BMI - milk does a body fat?

As you know lactase persistence (LP), which confers the ability to digest lactose sugar as an adult, is an evolutionarily recent development. On the order of 1/3 of the human population exhibits LP, due to a variety of genetic mutations which seem to arise in the cultural background of the domestication of cattle. Some have asked about the possible associations between LP & height & weight before. A new paper in Human Molecular Genetics looks at just that, European lactase persistence genotype shows evidence of association with increase in body mass index: The global prevalence of…

T.H. Huxley on the ignorance of biology

Popularizers of science are faced with a daunting problem when it comes to communicating their enthusiasm for nature; their audience doesn't speak the same language. I don't mean this to say that scientists are inherently poor communicators or all deliver jargon-packed lectures that extinguish interest. Rather, many people don't have a grasp of the basic "alphabet" of science, and it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that what you or I might consider a "basic" fact is something that is not so easily grasped to someone who hasn't heard it before. This is made all the more difficult when…

The man has chutzpah

Dembski babbles on in his own little world, unaware of how ridiculous his strange contortions look. He has a paper out that compares Evolution as Alchemy, attempting to argue that the incompletely described history of life on earth means that evolution is as phony as an antiquated mystical philosophy about chemistry. In his usual turgid style, Dembski struggles to tell us what his gripe with alchemy and evolution is. What, then, is the problem with alchemy? Alchemy's problem is its lack of causal specificity. Causal specificity means specifying a cause sufficient to account for an effect…

Simple Answers To Stupider Questions

As part of our multi-part colloquy regarding whether Martin Cothran is, in fact, a gigantic bigot for wanting to take away marriages from 18,000 gay people married in California, the Disco. Inst. blogger wonders: Isn't the whole debate about whether they are marriages in the first place? No. As they say: PROP 8: ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME–SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. But really, all you need to know about Cothran comes from this sentence, which is wrong in about a brazillion ways: Josh Rosenau, who teaches at the ever more ludicrous National Association for Science Education (NASE) and… First, I am…

Science advisor

This summer, I sat in with some big shots to discuss the future of science policy in an Obama Presidency, and of space policy in particular. One of the ideas I pushed, and which received general support, was the importance of a cabinet-level science advisor to the President, one who would be appointed and confirmed quickly, and given maximal access to the President and his decision-making process. Many scientists and science societies agree. Now that Obama is planning his transition, the question moves to a more practical realm: who should he appoint? First, I think the science advisor…