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So Long and Thanks For All the Fish!

This blog has moved. The new location is http://dabacon.org/pontiff. So long and thanks for all the fish! Over the past three years I've had a good time blogging here at Scienceblogs. Though I rarely agree with much they say (haha, classic curmudgeon that I am) I can honestly say my fellow Sciencebloggers are a great bunch of people, and I'm sure I'll continue to get irritated at what they write for many years to come (just kidding, I always agree with the physicists! ;) ) "Great Dave, thanks for taking a stand against the PepsiCo blog!" Well actually, I've been thinking about leaving…

Social science = art?

Okay. . . I know that bioephemera is not the most compartmentalized, well-defined example of "science blogging." Many of the subjects I blog about aren't science at all - which begs the question, what exactly is "science"? In my defense, I'm not the only one that's confused. Check out this story from today's NYT Arts section: Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation's brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq,…

Bariatric Surgery: Types of Obesity Surgery, Explained

A fantastic, and open-access, review paper just came out on the subject of surgical solutions to obesity which answered a lot of my questions regarding this growing area of treatment. Written by Kral and Naslund, who are both professors of surgery, it begins with the terse opener "Obesity is very prevalent." Well, in America at least, you can say that again. Obesity is often the result of many different factors, but eventually it becomes clear that our bodies did not evolve in an environment of constant, abundant, and caloric-rich food. Human bodies are designed to want to eat, to love to eat…

Long-time Kubrick Assistant Speaks

Like most scientists and nerds, the innovative and often science-fictiony work of Stanley Kubrick holds a spot of honor in my heart. However, the man himself was an sometimes seen as an enigma, a very private person. Jamie Stuart, cyber-friend and fellow admirirer of all things Kubrick, gave me the heads up to an exclusive interview he did for The Reeler with longtime Kubrick assisant Leon Vitali. Vitali worked with Kubrick for nearly 25 years, spanning from 1975's Barry Lyndon to Eyes Wide Shut, and is perhaps one of only a handful of people who knew Kubrick well, both profesionally and…

What I Want Out of This Is.....

.....discussion. I'm not out for blood, and I'm really kinda hoping that I'll get an email in my inbox today that says "Yes, feel free to use and discuss the mentioned graphs." So far I haven't, and I think that's sad. In piling on here, and around the internet, I just want people to think about what the purpose of doing federally funded research is. Its not so it can molder away on a shelf, far from the eyes of those who paid for it and can benefit from it. I'd like to think this knowledge is for everyone, and that the free, unfettered exchange of ideas is sometimes facilitated by visual…

Nancy Drew and the Quandary of Quantum Chromodynamics

Ok - so Nancy Drew was never into string theory. But parents and teachers, take note: the Magnet Lab website at FSU mantains a list of books that incorporate painless, plot-relevant science lessons: Take as an example the below excerpt from one of our featured books, Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster. Enterprising middle school teachers could use this story as a jumping-off point for a discussion about superconductors. "Don't you see?" said the Professor. "It's a superconductor." "But that's incredible!" Dr. Fenster said. "At room temperature?" "So it appears. There's no other explanation." "…

The Congress of/for Curious People: upcoming events in New York

This week at Coney Island, the first ever "Congress for Curious People" brings together historians of science, artists, taxidermists, musicologists, and all manner of. . . curious people. It's part of the larger "Congress of Curious Peoples": Every spring Coney Island USA convenes The Congress of Curious Peoples, a 10-day gathering of unique individuals at Sideshows by the Seashore and the Coney Island Museum, celebrating Coney Island's subversive and exciting power and exploring its political, artistic, and spectacular possibilities through performances, exhibitions, and films by important…

The most ridiculous/depressing student email ever?

I know nothing proves you're old as thoroughly as bewailing the foibles of kids these days and complaining that they're not as hard-working as you were. But I have to note that this letter - from a disgruntled student who thinks he's the next Bill Gates - is beautifully indicative of everything I think is wrong with education today: You commented that I had probably the best example, to the assigned question, out of all the students participating. However, you also said that I did not complete the assignment as instructed, because I did not explain with the proper support from the text book…

The self-defeating culture of graduate education

Louis Menand has a must-read article on what's wrong with graduate education in the Harvard Magazine: Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is…

Mommy Monday: How I became the Hippie Mommy

When I lived in Utopia, I was pretty mainstream. I drove to work, but shopped at the cooperative grocery. I liked to hike and get outdoors, support local businesses, and compost. So naturally when I was pregnant, I consulted my instincts and my mommy-friends and made some decisions about how I was going to parent. And for the few months that I parented in Utopia, things went pretty well and when I needed support I had numerous friends and neighbors to turn to. But then I moved to Mystery City, and I realized how non-mainstream my ways really were. People look at us as if we are odd when we do…

Hot Cognition Is Back in the Blogosophere

The Westen et al. study on the motivated reasoning of political partisons has made its way back into the blogosphere, first with Will Wilkerson, and now fellow Science Blogger Ed Brayton. I posted on the study, and hot cognition/motivated reasoning in general back in March, when the study was first noticed by the press and bloggers. I'm not exactly pleased to see the study popping up again, because it was so massively misinterpreted last time, with people making claims to the effect that the study demonstrated the impossibility of political persuasion. One reporter, writing about the paper…

Google Predicts Memory, and Probably Everything Else

There's a paper in the December 2007 issue of Psychological Science titled "Google and the Mind: Predicting Fluency With PageRank." Here's the abstract: Griffiths, T.L., Steyvers, M., & Firl, A. (2007). Google and the mind: Predicting fluency with PageRank. Psychological Science, 18(12), 1069-1076. Abstract Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank…

Question for the Linguists/Psycholinguists in the House

Does anyone around here know of a program or programs that can do the following things with text: Frequency counts for parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). Sort or score words/phrases based on how abstract or concrete they are. UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the suggestions and tips. I'll try them out tomorrow when I get in the lab. Since I asked without giving you any details, let me give you a brief, though vague description of the project. A few years ago, another psychologist and I wrote a review/theory paper about a particular type of category that we thought sounded…

Incredible Editorial on Libby

There really isn't much to say about this, if you adhere to the notion that if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all... src="http://www.mlive.com/images/article/grp_news.gif" alt="Grand Rapids Press" border="0" height="50" width="333"> href="http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/news-2/117359923256810.xml&coll=6">Verdict of perjury Sunday, March 11, 2007 Conviction of vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby last week had little to do with the core allegations in the CIA leak affair, but it said something big about American law…

Two Views of Richat Structure

The Richat Structure is not a structure in the usual sense.  It is a natural feature located in the Sahara Desert of Mauritania.  It is unusual because it is nearly circular.  It was href="http://www.eorc.nasda.go.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2003/tp031015.html">first observed from space, in 1965, by the astronauts James A. McDivitt and Edward H. White.  (Irrelevant comment: both McDivitt and White attended the University of Michigan, and there is a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=mcdivitt&w=27345247%40N00">plaza, near the diag, named for them.) At first, href="http://www.…

Armchair Philosophy

It's discouraging seeing so many people go so wrong all at once. It makes you question the idea that each of us has unlimited potential for good. Who said that?  And what was the subject?   The quote comes from an editorial by href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrison_Keillor" rel="tag">Garrison Keillor, host of " href="http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/" rel="tag">A Prairie Home Companion."  He was brought up a member of the Plymouth Brethren, but went through a Lutheran phase, and now is an Episcopalian.  None of that is pertinent, at the moment, but I thought it was…

A way to break out of the pyramid scheme

I was going to write something about the latest analysis of NIH funding in Science, but DrugMonkey did the work for me so go read his post. The bottom line is that NIH funding goes through boom-bust cycles that cause instability throughout the biomedical fields. In boom times the biomedical research fields recruit lots of grad students and postdocs (many of these recruits being foreign), after all the PIs need the work force and they now have funds to pay them. Then when these junior scientists go looking for their own lab and their first R01, the lack of funds forces many out of academia. To…

A day in the life

7AM, up out of bed. I prepare breakfast, two slices of focaccia with salmon and olive spread with an espresso to wash it all down. I quickly flip through the paper. For once the NY Times Science section has an article on some basic molecular biology (it must have been the evolution angle). After jumping in and out of the shower, I throw some clothes on and walk to the lab listening to the latest Nature podcast. 8AM, I prepare my tissue culture cells for the final round of experiments and spin down several samples of DNA for microinjections. 9AM-2PM, five hours of brain numbing microinjection…

(Almost*) First Clinical Trial with RNA Aptamers

Check this out: First-in-Human Experience of an Antidote-Controlled Anticoagulant Using RNA Aptamer Technology From the paper: A translatable platform for developing an optimal parenteral anticoagulant should consider several prerequisite properties: easy delivery, rapid onset of action, and predictable responses among the dose, pharmacokinetic profile, and pharmacodynamic effects to reduce the requirement for routine monitoring. Additionally, an optimal anticoagulant should be biologically selective and actively reversible. What is in use currently? Unfractionated heparin is currently the…

Diatoms…iiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace!

You all know that the Journal of Cosmology is complete crap, right? In addition to some of the worst web design ever — it looks like a drunk clown puked up his fruit loops onto a grid of 1990s-style tables — the content is ridiculous, predictable, and credulous. Their big thing is seeing life in every space rock, or raining down from Mars, or drifting in vast clouds through the galaxy. I've criticized their absurd conclusions before, and jumped on the quality of their work, and in return…they photoshopped my face onto a picture of an obese woman in a negligee. Multiple times. That's the kind…

A little bit more on Sept 11th

A good friend Claudia, posted a picture on her photoblog (aroundaboutme) that reminded me of something ... One day, summer of 2002 I think, I decided to take the day off and walk down the Hudson River by myself from the Upper Westside to ... well as far as I could go. It was a time in New York when things felt unhinged. We were all zombies, the world felt different and we were unsure of what to do next. But there was much solidarity between New Yorkers. At some point a woman who was also strolling down the river edge just started talking to me. We walked about 20 blocks together. Her son was…

All You Have To Do Is Just One Thing

A trip to my local book store this morning was rewarded with an exceptional find, The Universe Below by Broad. I cannot wait to delve into this tasty treat. Broad reminds me of an often too forgotten concept, the deep sea is the largest of habitat on earth. Randomly place a point on our planet and it would be deep sea. In our daily activities so far removed from this environment, we begin to think all the earth is like our tiny, little corner. We begin to think this is all there is. Broad wonderfully places our lives and space into perspective with a simple diagram (recreated above). By…

Biofuels: What Hole Do Plants Belong In?

The question is whether crops belong in your mouth or your gastank? Bioscience has a interesting article from June with National Geographic following on their heals this month. Both are very interesting and worth the read. Nash in Bioscience lays out what are the potential ill effects of moving to biofuels: Diversion of food crops such as corn and soybeans into gas tanks Release of greenhouse gases Conversion of wildlife habitat into energy-crop farmland Accelerating soil depletion Drawdown of scarce water resources for irrigation Spread of invasive species used as energy crops Illusion of…

Sympathy for exam-takers (at least, in some cases).

Another dispatch from grading Hell (fourth circle), in which the reader gains some insight into circumstances which evoke my sympathy, and circumstances which do not. I have this pedagogical strategy where I try to make my students think more than they have to write. One way this strategy manifests itself is in how I deal with case studies on finals exams. We've spent the whole semester working up case study responses following a standard plan of attack -- identifying the interested parties in the case, the potential consequences for those interested parties if the protagonist in the case…

Questions for the presidential candidates: where do you stand on science?

Science matters. It's hard to make good decisions in today's world that aren't somehow informed by sound science -- especially if you're the head of state of a country like the USA. This means that it's important to know where the people lined up to get the job of President of the United States stand on science. Those of us deciding how to vote could use this information, and even you folks who are subject to US foreign policy have a significant interest in knowing what you'll be in for. There ought to be a presidential debate focused on science and technology before the 2008 election. It…

Blogger Challenge update (day 23): where we are now, and where we can go.

In the last 22.5 days, ScienceBloggers and their generous readers have: Mounted twenty challenges to fund educational projects through DonorsChoose. Met (and exceeded!) the targets in five of those challenges (for which I issue a heartfelt "w00t!" to the readers of Retrospectacle, Deep Sea News, evolgen, Signout, and Pharyngula). Secured every last cent of the $15,000 in matching funds put up by Seed. Secured more than $2,000 from the Richard Dawkins Foundation to fund classroom projects in the Pharyngula challenge. Raised $43,079 so far (before even counting that $15,000 in matching funds…

Friday Sprog Blogging: "Dinosaur Day" declared.

Yes, the Free-Ride offspring think they have the power to declare today "Dinosaur Day". This is your official notification. It's not all play on "Dinosaur Day" though. Sometimes a sprog has homework to do. The elder Free-Ride offspring had a dinosaur project due this week, a model of a dinosaur (yes, I know that officially pteranodon doesn't count as a dinosaur because of the whole flying thing -- they're not drawing such sharp distinctions for this project) accompanied by a brief paragraph about where that dinosaur lived, what it ate, and the usual sort of dinoformatics. (Actually,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: matter for kindergarteners.

Dr. Free-Ride's better half taught the younger Free-Ride offspring's kindergarten class about matter this week. It was a lesson that included a working definition, some hands-on explorations of the properties of different sorts of matter, and a little magic. Working definition of matter (for kindergarteners): Something that has mass, takes up space, and that interacts with our senses. ("But what of electrons?" asked Dr. Free-Ride when hearing about the lesson. "Too soon!" replied Dr. Free-Ride's better half.) Hands-on exploration: Air is matter. The kids inflated balloons (some with…

Are Scientists Productive?

After my last post on the frustrating inefficiencies of experimental failure, I recieved an interesting comment: I discovered in the late stages of graduate school that my extremely long hours (upwards of 80/week) were extraordinarily unproductive. I was doing cell culture and electrophysiology and while I had reams of data, it wasn't going anywhere. Only when I switched to a lab doing slice electrophysiology, where the length of the day is limited by the survival of the slice (~6hrs after cutting, making for a 8-9 hr day), did I discover that I could get more work done in less time by…

Standing up for what we believe.

(Click to embiggen) Tomorrow, April 8, 2010, Pro-Test for Science will be holding its second rally in Los Angeles in support of humanely conducted, ethical animal research and the people who conduct it. Their first rally last April drew approximately 700 people to the streets to support the scientific research that offers hope to patients (both human and veterinary) and their families. Speaking of Research has details on tomorrow's rally: This rally, on the UCLA campus seeks to: Communicate a better understanding of animal research to the public, its importance to medical progress, and…

Won't someone think of the children?

Around these parts, folks sometimes get het up about issues like scientific literacy (or lack thereof) in the general public, public interest (or lack thereof) in matters scientific, and whether scientists have the chops to communicate information clearly to non-scientists. It's worth remembering that a large group of non-scientists are kids, and that they are actively sucking information from wherever they can get it -- parents, teachers, television, internet, even books. Ahh, books. We like books. Books can get kids interested and excited about a topic even in the absence of an adult…

Light in the darkness.

A colleague of Super Sally's forwarded her this*: It's funny because it's true, and the pain isn't just from laughing so hard. This seems like a very scary time to be near retirement age, since the value of so many retirement funds (invested in the stock market) has dropped so significantly. On the other hand, to the extent that the market mess leads to a decrease in jobs, it's not such a red-hot time to be years away from retirement age, either. We can shake our tiny fists at all this. Or, to the extent that we can, we can shake our tiny checkbooks and try to bring a bit more light to…

Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds

Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds is an academic anthology of key writing about bird evolution. There are two main things that distinguish this book: 1) It includes quite a bit on fossils and their bearing on bird evolution, a refreshing change from DNA-based phylogenies which can by and large only address later questions of bird evolution; and 2) It includes a lot more about the early evolutionary context of birds (such as in the context of theropods) than one usually sees, rather than the diversification of birds per se, though it does address the latter as well.…

Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor's Guide

I'm sitting here looking at Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor's Guide. I've never been to the Antarctic so I can't tell you what I think of this book from the pragmatic angle of how well it works as a guide, but I can tell you that I've learned a number of things just looking at the book. For one thing, I had no idea that almost all tourist visits to Antarctica go to the same general area of the continent. I guess that makes sense given the geography of the region, but it had not occurred to me before. I've guided a number of tours in Africa and some of my clients were very serious world…

Convergences

Everything is connected to everything else. Sometimes, the connections are non-trivial. Often they are fundamental, sometimes exploitable, and now and then very potent sources of debate and discussion. I've come to think that a measure of sanity is the degree to which one limits a sense of connection when taking in new information. For instance, I was lambasted by a fellow blogger a few months ago when he insisted that there were connections ... of influence, of a pecuniary nature, at least ... between me and a major Big Science institution which caused me to say things that he thought I…

"I bless this teddy bear in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost."

When I was a little kid, my cousin, who was an actual Catholic Arch Bishop (Archbishop of Anchorage) came over to the house one day, and I saw family elders approach him, one by one, genuflect and kiss his ring. Then one or two of my relatives brought him sacred objects for him to bless. One of the objects was the wooden cross that hung on our wall, similar to others hanging on Catholic walls in other Catholic homes, near the main entrance way to the house. It was hollow and included several items that would be used for the performance of either extreme unction (the "last rights") or, if…

The Scienceblogs Strike is Over

Or at least, Greg Laden's Blog is no longer on strike. There is a scheduled phone conversation today between an elite subset of bloggers and the management. I have no idea how the phone call will go (or went), but I've been promised a summary eventually. The bloggers were concerned about delayed paychecks. They were concerned about lousy technical support. They were concerned about a corporate blog being sprung on us, and about the potential of similar things happening in the future, and they were concerned more generally about communications between management and the bloggers, claiming…

Enigmatic Sex Ratio in a Nearly Extinct Bird

Pterodroma magentae is the Magenta Petral (also known as the Chatham Island Taiko). There are between 8 and 15 breeding pairs in the New Zealand home range of this species. Indeed, this bird was thought extinct for quite some time before it was rediscovered in 1978. A recent study indicates something funny is going on with sex ratio and mating strategies in this bird, which may, although I'm not quite sure how, lead to improved conservation efforts. From a BirdLife press release: A study into one of the world's rarest seabirds provides knowledge that could help avoid extinction.…

New NCSE Video

"Teaching Creationism in Schools," the second in a series of videos produced by NCSE, debuted at expelledexposed.com on April 23, 2008. The brief video presents three incidents in which NCSE helped concerned citizens to resist assaults on the integrity of evolution education. In the video, NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott explains: "If we're going to have good science education, now and in the future, we have to support people like Erec [Hillis], people like the citizens of Dover, and people like the citizens in Kansas, and we have to put out those brushfires. And NCSE is going to be there until…

Technology News

ISO takes full charge of Open XML, sets up 'harmonization' group We can't call it "Office Open XML" anymore, because it no longer belongs to Microsoft Office exclusively. As of yesterday, International Organization for Standardization committee SC 34 passed a resolution that effectively assumes stewardship of Open XML, the document format standard originally produced by Microsoft, and which is now officially under new management. A Cleaner, Leaner Jet JET engines are now so reliable that a pilot can go an entire career without seeing one fail. Autopilots are so good that some airlines have…

Costly Placebo Works Better Than Cheap One

Given two pills, one that costs ten cents and the other that cost $2.50, with both being simple sugar pills with no possible medical benefit, the more expensive pill works better to ameliorate certain conditions. I'm sure that the pharmaceutical companies will like this! Durham, NC -- A 10-cent pill doesn't kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a provocative study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. "Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more…

What to do about the Huffington Post's support for anti-vaccine nonsense and quackery?

I've been complaining about the antivaccine lunacy at The Huffington Post for a very long time--since a mere two or three weeks after The Huffington Post first came into existence, when it had already become apparent that, in terms of health coverage, HuffPo was nothing more than Arianna's Happy Home for Loony Antivaccinationists. Lately, I've become even more disturbed by the appearance of outright quackery, such as recommending colon cleanses and "detox" to fight infectious diseases and the boosting of homeopathy and the quackery that is the Beck Protocol as treatments for swine flu and…

An Age of Autism commenter destroys yet another irony meter

riley'smom is very unhappy with Amy Wallace: I wrote Ms. Wallace a private email. I intentionally wrote it directly to her private email and DID NOT post it in the comments section of Wired Mag. I asked her about her one sided-biased interview with Mr Offit and asked if she planned to NOW do a fair and balanced report as many were questioning her porfessional reasoning. I also asked her how it felt to be one of Offit's whores...that perhaps she and Amanda Peet should get together and compare notes on how Ms Peets career was doing since she joined the Offit band wagon. I received an email back…

The "Health Ranger" Mike Adams needs your help for his wiki!

I've had a lot of fun over the last couple of years deconstructing the black holes of woo that a certain advocate of "natural" remedies likes to lay down on a regular basis. Yes, I'm referring to a guy named Mike Adams, who runs a website called NaturalNews.com. Indeed, Adams has made NaturalNews.com a bastion of quackery and outright wingnuttery. Apparently that isn't enough. I don't know how long it's been around, but apparently Mike Adams is branching out. Now he's decided that he wants to do a wiki about "natural" living. He's calling it, appropriately enough, Naturalpedia: Welcome to…

Are we playing it too safe in cancer research? (Oops, Orac missed one)

This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday's NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to PubMed. A couple of key points follow about the examples cited in the NYT article. Regarding Dennis Slamon: I hate to criticize Dennis Slamon, because the HER2 to Herceptin story is a great one. But the image one gets of his research program being saved by a friend from Revlon while the NCI…

Fumento and Wikipedia

Michael Fumento complains about his Wikipedia article: An Aussie named Tim Lambert has as his raison d'etre attacking anybody who is more intelligent, more successful, and more relevant than he is. That leaves him with 6.3 million targets -- more or less. But I ended up on his radar screen by making fun of him, as I am now. So he attacks me in any way he can, which as it happens is limited to the only two outlets in the whole world that will deign to publish him -- his blog and Wikipedia. (Perhaps at some point his blog will say "Enough is enough!" but probably not.) Nor will Wikipedia reject…

Pat Michaels goes quote mining

Media Matters catches Pat Michaels in an outrageous bit of quote mining: MICHAELS: Well, it's an exaggeration. Global warming is a very real thing. People have something to do with it in the last several decades of the 20th century. But what people do on this issue is they exaggerate it. I have a quote from [Gore], from Grist magazine recently. He said, "I believe it's appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is." HANNITY: Yeah. MICHAELS: He says it's appropriate to over-represent the danger on this issue. You have to realize what he said and…

Lott sues Levitt

The Chicago Tribune reports: A scholar known for his work on guns and crime filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the best-seller "Freakonomics." John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U. of C. visiting professor, alleges that Levitt defamed him in the book by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime. Publishers Weekly ranked "Freakonomics" eighth this week for non-fiction hardcover books. According to Levitt's book: "When other…

Brignell's Law of Scientific Consensus

Our old friend John Brignell has uncovered "The greatest conspiracy in human history". According to Brignell that's what global warming is, and: It is not that the proponents are simply mistaken---that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of doubters, the direction…

The Case of the Vanishing Wish List

Back in 2003 I reported on The Case of the File from the Future, where Lott tried to destroy some incriminating evidence, but did it so ineptly that he made things worse for himself. Well, he's done it again. After I posted the story of Economist123 and his book reviews, "Tom H" (one of Lott's sock puppets) popped up to argue that Economist123 was not John Lott and had just happened to repost a John Lott review. Unlikely, but just possible, so, at 12:06 I pointed out another damning piece of evidence: So, Tom H, you claim that Economist123 is just somebody else who reposted Lott's…