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Stuff worth reading.

I want to share some of the items I've been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very "summertime" feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life. At Cocktail Party Physics, there's a truly excellent post on rollercoasters, including some history behind the coolest way to make your stomach drop. (Last time I took the sprogs to The Tech, they had a station where you could design your own rollercoaster ride, putting together loops, corkscrews, and straight rises and falls, then experience it on a simulator. It frustrated the sprogs,…

Advice on how to be ethical.

Bruce Weinstein ("The Ethics Guy" at BusinessWeek.com) offers advice on how to be ethical to the business school class of 2009. His five nuggets of advice seem like good ones for anyone who is interested in being ethical. Two in particular jumped out at me: 1. LISTEN TO THE WHISPERS. Frances Hesselbein, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management) and former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, speaks of the importance of "listening to the whispers" you hear every time you're about to make a decision.…

Circumstances under which it is OK for scientists to pull numbers out of thin air?

Some commenters on my last post seem to be of the view that it is perfectly fine for scientists to pull numbers out of thin air to bolster their claims, at least under some circumstances. I think it's a fair question to ask: In which circumstances are you comfortable giving scientists the go-ahead to make up their numbers? One suggestion was that scientists ought to be "permitted to use ordinary language meanings of words and colloquialisms in their non-peer reviewed discourse" -- or at least, to do so in discussions on blogs. I take it this assumes that "ordinary language meanings of words…

R.I.P. Bernadine Healy

It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn't know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had this glioma and survived 13 years. Compare that to David Servan-Schreiber, who survived his brain tumor for 20 years and attributed much of it not just to medical science, but to all the woo he came to believe in and practice. For purposes of this blog, the reason her death is even worth noting briefly is…

Killed in the line of duty

It saddens people, but doesn't particularly surprise, when some professionals are killed in the line of duty. For professions such as soldier, police office, and firefighter, for example, it's expected that occasionally some will lose their lives in the line of duty because of the dangerous nature of the job. Less expected is when medical professionals suffer similar sacrifices. For example, a few days ago at my old alma mater, the University of Michigan, a Survival Flight air ambulance on the way back from Wisconsin after procuring organs for transplant crashed into Lake Michigan with no…

Prince turned my son gay!

Believe it or not, the FCC is receiving a fair number of complaints over the Superbowl halftime show featuring His Purpleness, particularly the part where he did a bit of a phallic thing with his guitar (as if generations of rockers haven't done the whole guitar as wank-off thing since at least the 1960's--heck David Bowie used to simulate oral sex on Mick Ronson's guitar back in his Ziggy Stardust days, although I will concede that he never played the Superbowl). I mean, get a load of this complaint: During Prince's rendition of Purple Rain, which I think is a really great song, there…

My New Year's Dream

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions—they're always so narrow and boring. I'd rather advance some bigger goals. When I was a young fellow, and my father was teaching me how to swing a bat, he'd tell me I shouldn't aim to hit the ball, I should try to swing through it. When he was teaching me how to play football, he'd tell me I shouldn't aim for the lineman's chest, I should set the goal of running straight through the guy and a hundred yards downfield. (Of course, there were other words of wisdom from my father, like "you're a born nerd, boy, and I don't know why we're wastin' time with…

Stop CBS from airing anti-vaccine ads on its Times Square JumboTron

I tell ya. I take a weekend off from this blog, and what do I find on Sunday night when I sit back down to take a look and see if there's anything I want to blog about? Damn if those anti-vaccine loons aren't pulling a fast one while I'm not looking. It turns out that über-quack Joe Mercola is teaming up once again with Barbara Loe Fisher's the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) in a desperate attempt for the NVIC to try to demonstrate that it's still relevant in the anti-vaccine movement after having been supplanted by Generation rescue. This time around, they're doing SafeMinds one…

Better late than never: The Swedish mammography study and screening for women under 50

Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn't totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a "landmark" study. I had just enough time to look it over briefly and decide that I really should blog about it, particularly given that it came hot on the heels of a Norwegian study less than a week before that found the benefits of mammography to be less than previously believed and even more…

The ethics of vaccine refusal: Vaccine refuseniks as freeloaders

Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease drops, leaving no reservoir of infectious agent to facilitate disease spread. The end result is that the unvaccinated are also protected, which is important for children who can't be vaccinated because they are either too young, have a medical…

Good news for Daniel Hauser!

I've been writing a lot about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue "alternative therapy" based on fear of chemotherapy and the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered Daniel's parents to make sure that Daniel received the chemotherapy and radiation therapy he needed, Daniel and his mother Colleen went on the lam last week and were last thought to be heading for Mexico and almost certain death. That is, until sanity prevailed…

Prosecuting another case of medical neglect: Kristen LaBrie charged with manslaughter

Almost exactly a year ago, I noted the very sad case of Jeremy LaBrie, an 8 year old autistic child with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother Kristen withheld his medications and failed to take him to appointments with his oncologist. As a result of his failing to undergo his complete course of chemotherapy, his cancer returned with a vengeance. As of one year ago, his odds of survival were estimated to be no more than 10-20%, after having had a good prognosis when initially diagnosed. At the time, I thought it was entirely appropriate for the state to prosecute Kristen LaBrie for medical…

Le Canard Noir in trouble? I'm there!

Via WhiteCoat Underground, I've learned of a most disturbing development. Remember Le Canard Noir? He's the skeptical blogger whose Quackometer was one of my favorite websites and tools for identifying pseudoscience and quackery caused him to run afoul of the Society of Homeopaths and a highly dubious practitioner named Joseph Chikelue Obi, both of whom tried to get his Internet service provider to boot him off of its servers using vacuous legal threats of libel actions? Both led to an outcry from the medical and skeptical blogosphere in the form of many, many copies of the offending text…

Antivaccination propaganda in Oklahoma City

Any Oklahoma City skeptics out there reading this? I just found an event that could use the presence of some actual science-minded individuals to refute the nonsense that's going to be there. It's an event called Educate Before You Vaccinate, and it's happening on January 19. Looking at the pamphlet advertising the event, I see the standard antivaccination lies about vaccines causing autism and some really dumb pseudoscientific blather about how a "genetic epidemic" of autism is impossible. The keynote speaker will be April Renée, keynote speaker for Vaccine Injured Children (VIC) and…

The DDT ban myth that will not die

A NY Times article on Arata Kochi, new chief of the World Health Organization's global malaria program wrongly stated that DDT was banned and had to be corrected: An article in Science Times on Tuesday, profiling Dr. Arata Kochi, the new chief of the World Health Organization's campaign against malaria, referred imprecisely to the pesticide DDT, which can kill the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Its use has been banned in many countries for environmental reasons; it has not been withdrawn entirely. Kochi is shaking things up in the WHO anti-malaria effort: In January, he attacked the…

A new voice takes on the inflitration of woo into academic medicine

If you think Orac's insolence doesn't live up to the name of this blog, at least when it comes to lamenting the infiltration of unscientific, non-evidence-based modalities into academic medicine, such as the use of reiki in a top academic trauma hospital, woo finding its way into the mandatory curriculum of a prestigious medical center and becoming more prevalent in the elective curriculum of others (even to the point of credulous acceptance of quackery such as homeopathy), woo being trumpeted by the largest medical student organization in the U.S., and even what I thought to be the most…

Followup on the Iranian cartoon contest

Yesterday, I posted about a story indicating that a Danish newspaper had published some of the cartoons from the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon contest, pointing out how, when the original Danish cartoons poking fun at Islam were published, we saw riots, death threats, and demands for punishment. When Iran, supposedly to make fun of the Holocaust and the West's supposed "double standard" with respect to the Holocaust, holds a contest and publishes a bunch of anti-Semitic cartoons, the reaction is largely a worldwide shrug of the shoulders and some fairly minor protests. Some of the collective yawn…

The difference between freedom and theocracy

Here's something very telling: A Danish newspaper has printed cartoons about the Holocaust commissioned by Iran after cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests. The newspaper - Information - published six of the cartoons, which are on display in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Several of the cartoons contrast the plight of the Palestinians with that of the victims of the Holocaust. Editor-in-chief Palle Weis said he had thought carefully about publishing the cartoons and said it was not a stunt. He told the BBC the cartoons accompanied a news story about the exhibition. He said…

Telegraph takes lead from Australian

The Australian has fallen well behind in the race for the 2009 ward for most consistently wrong media outlet. They've published a piece by Mike Steketee that debunks common denialist arguments. He points out the difference between long and short term trends, that the Oregon petition is very light on climatologists and that climate models have got it right: Neville Nicholls, of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science, has been studying climate change and climate variability for 35 years and his advice has been drawn on by the IPCC. He says it is basic laboratory…

Babylon 5 to return?

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I really loved Babylon 5 while it was on; it was one of my favorite TV series of all time, and I own all five seasons on DVD. Even though the fifth and final season seemed a bit stretched out, the last five or six episodes of the series made up for it, so that the conclusion packed every bit of the punch that the high points of the best seasons (seasons two and three) did. So, what to make of this? BURBANK, CA, November 13, 2006 - Warner Home Video (WHV) and Warner Bros. Television (WBTV) have announced the start of production of "Babylon 5: The Lost…

The denialists

The Give Up Blog has a post outlining a general problem: denialists. The author is putting together a list of common tactics used by denialists of all stripes, whether they're trying to pretend global warming isn't happening, Hitler didn't kill all those Jews, or evolution is a hoax, and they represent a snapshot of the hallmarks of crank anti-science. Most of the examples he's using are from climate change, but they also fit quite well with the creation-evolution debates. Here are the key features: Conspiracy. Accuse the mainstream scientists of all being in it to defraud the government of…

Another variant on chiropractic

A while ago, I discussed the case of a chiropracter who has pioneered a technique of "touchless" chiropractic, manipulating patient's spines without even touching them. Well, an Ohio chiropracter has gone one step further. He claims he can cure patients by going back in time: COLUMBUS, Ohio - A chiropractor who claims he can treat anyone by reaching back in time to when an injury occurred has attracted the attention of state regulators. The Ohio State Chiropractic Board, in a notice of hearing, has accused James Burda of Athens of being "unable to practice chiropractic according to acceptable…

Best of the Cheerful Oncologist: "How to Get Your Doctor to Listen to You"

[Editor's Note: From time to time the narrator of this blog petitions the board of directors of Cheerful Oncologist Productions, Ltd. to reprint certain posts from his old sites that he finds interesting, although where he comes up with this delusion is beyond us. Anyway, in order to humor him and also keep our payroll for security low we are happy to reproduce this amateurish attempt, complete and without any editing, which first appeared on October 6, 2004. [Sit vis vobiscum!] Have you ever been diagnosed with a serious illness, or known someone facing such a health crisis? Do you recall…

I have failed

Now that 2009 is about to kick into gear, I have to look back at 2008 one last time to acknowledge one failure. As a backdrop to that failure, I note that the antivaccine propaganda site Age of Autism has posted a series of their People of the Year "awards" for 2008, including, antivaccine luminaries such as: Person of the Year: Dr. Bernardine Healy. Just because a hack political appointee known to tilt science to be in line with ideology hops on the "too many too soon" bandwagon, AoA thinks it has a legitimate argument from authority. It doesn't. Couple of the Year: Jenny McCarthy and Jim…

Sunflower Sunday (aka Friday Fractal LIV)

If we look at the natural world around us, fractals abound. Sometimes, not. This is the greatest puzzle to me... not that fractals appear in nature, but the fact that not everything is a fractal. Working on this week’s layered set (which took a while, mostly due to unrelated circumstances) I found myself questioning that inconsistency. As I try to imitate some iterative, aperiodic pattern with my computer, I often find myself layering one fractal on top of another, to match the foreground and background (i.e., tree and sky, or clouds and land.) Sometimes, I’ll use more than a couple. This…

Where Eagles Dare

You’ve probably heard that the Bald Eagle was removed from the endangered species list this week. The announcement was rather timely, allowing the media to paste patriotic eagle pictures all over the place around the Fourth of July. It also came not too long after Rachel Carson’s 100th birthday. Carson, author of Silent Spring, was the driving force in saving the eagles, when she showed how pesticides were responsible for thinning raptor eggshells. She passed away several years after Silent Spring was published, so she couldn’t see the eagle’s victorious recovery. Should we be celebrating in…

The Value of a Sunflower

Sometimes, reading philosophy is a lot like medieval torture. For some reason, talking about things like objectivity in ethics or the meaning of existence requires numerous dry definitions and explanations. This process causes the reader to be overwhelmed and confused. I'd rather not do that, here. Still, I'd like to approach the subject of values. I've spent the last few days trying to decide the best way to do that. So, instead of diving into semantics and logic, I figured I'd just start with a sunflower. A sunflower seems simple enough, right? It's pretty enough to show up on dresses and…

AskScience: Is it possible to get multiple different colds/flu viruses at the same time?

There are a lot of reasons that posts to this blog sometimes don't happen for months at a time, but one of them is that I can often get sucked down the rabbit hole that is Reddit. If you don't know about reddit yet, you may not want to click that link, but if you do know (and you're reading this blog), you may know about one of the communities (subreddits) there - a place called r/askscience. It's a forum where people can ask questions of a scientific nature (anything from "Why are pigeons so successful as an urban animal?" to "What's so special about the speed of light?"), and then actual…

Bacterial Burglary

I feel like I've seen this movie before. A group of thieves need to gain entry to a highly secured vault. The vault door is nearly impregnable, and once inside, there are motion sensors, security cameras and laser trip lines, all of which sound the alarm. When the security guards hear what's happening, they are told to release a deadly gas into the vault, killing anyone inside. But Salmonella enterica, that charming bug responsible for all manner of unpleasantness, is a clever burglar. It has learned to live inside macrophages - cells that are usually used to destroy bugs - and uses their own…

Surf's up brah

One of my earliest memories is of waves. I was 7 or 8 years old, on some nameless stretch of sand in southern California, and I was trapped. I don't remember when I learned to swim, and I don't remember a time when I didn't love the ocean. But I remember the day I learned to respect it. My brother Steve and his friend Chris were already back on the beach, but I don't remember why I hadn't followed them. Maybe I had something to prove; they were 3 years older and teased me incessantly, so I was always trying to show them that I could be tough. Maybe I meant to follow them, but couldn't swim…

Embryo screening for common diseases: coming soon?

A Nature News article describes the growing availability of technology that allows the screening of human embryos for hundreds of different genetic disorders prior to implantation. The technology is based on the same type of chips used by personal genomics companies like 23andMe, but the chips used for embryo screening would initially be used to target known rare disease-causing mutations or large chromosomal abnormalities rather than performing a genome-wide scan for common variants (in the article, a screening company director describes the targeted diseases as "nasty, early-onset and…

Report Calls for Stricter Regulation of Medical Conflicts of Interest

Yesterday, the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled "Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice". As far as I can tell, the full report is only available for a fairly substantial charge, but these are some of the main recommendations summed up in the report's press release: All academic medical centers, journals, professional societies, and other entities engaged in health research, education, clinical care, and development of practice guidelines should establish or strengthen conflict-of-interest policies, the report says. Disclosure by physicians and…

John McCain Embraces Scientifically-Disproved Vaccine/Autism Link

Via the ABC News blog Political Punch comes news that senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain has taken a strong stance on the discredited link between vaccination and autism... a stance contrary to scientific consensus. Here's what Jake Tapper wrote: At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there's strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical…

An Immigration Reality Check for Iowans

Although it feels like the 2008 Presidential Election has been going on for ages, it only officially kicks off tonight with the Iowa Caucuses. According to a recent poll, the main issues on the minds of Democratic caucus-goers will be Iraq (28%), health care (22%), and the economy (20%). Despite the pressing nature of all of these issues, the number one issue on the minds of Republicans when they go to their caucus will be immigration. While I don't think I'll ever understand this irrational obsession that some conservatives have with immigration, I can offer at least one reason why this…

House to Vote on Embryonic Stem Cell Bill This Thursday, Amniotic Stem Cells No Substitute for the Real Thing

One of the primary goals of Congress since the Democrats' stunning November 2006 election victory has been restoring federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. President Bush first imposed the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research in August 2001. After the House voted in May 2005 to overturn these restrictions, the Republican Senate stalled for over a year before finally voting in favor of reversing the funding ban as well in July 2006. Bush vetoed this legislation later that month, and both the House and the Senate were short the necessary 2/3 majority to override the veto.…

Jurassic World, David Peters, and how to rile up paleontologists

This new movie, Jurassic World, is stirring up a fascinating love/hate reaction from paleontologists. We all love to imagine dinosaurs resurrected, and the movies give us an image of what they'd be like, so everyone is happy to see that…and it also inspires new enthusiasm for fossils, so it helps lead to better support for good science. But at the same time, couldn't they at least get the science right? Kirkland, the state paleontologist at the Utah Geological Survey who has been involved in the discovery of 20 dinosaurs including the Utahraptor, admits such Hollywood blockbusters could…

Ideas for development: the blog as a filter

It might seem odd that a book about vaginas inspired a different way to blog, but that's the honest truth. I spend a lot of time thinking about how you might innovate when it comes to writing. It still irritates me that the overwhelming majority of the web is formatted in exactly the same way - rectangular containers interspersed by padded images. Consider how dull that is compared to the layout in any glossy magazine.  Sure, I understand why the web sticks to that format, but it doesn't make it any less boring to use. Anyway, back to innovation. One of the ideas that's been floating around…

Science and the European Elections: Stem Cell Research

This entry is part of the Science and the European Election series, a collaboration between SciencePunk and the Lay Scientist blog to encourage public discussion of the science policies of the major parties standing at the forthcoming European elections. It has been said that there are serious incompatibilities between member states on regulations governing stem cell research. How will you work to resolve these differences? Tim Worstall, UKIP: We wouldn't work to resolve such differences. The balancing of moral issues involved in something like embryonic stem cell research is properly a…

Interesting Reviewers

Jim Crow has published a perspective in Genetics on his favorite reviewers from 1952-1956 when he was associate editor of the journal. He prefaces it by writing: As far as I can ascertain, the editorial correspondence from that period is lost, so I am writing this from memory. Naturally, my recollections of events half a century ago are fallible, but I think I remember the essence. The identity of reviewers was confidential, so some of what follows is a breach of that confidence. I do not know whether there is a statute of limitations, but it seems reasonable that after half a century some…

Looking for Darwin with a Bad Pair of Eyes

Bad tests for natural selection are bad at detecting selection. Austin Hughes has published a fairly critical review of some methods used to detect natural selection in protein coding sequences. His attack on current methods for detecting natural selection is threefold. First, he claims that comparing non-synonymous to synonymous substitutions (see here) does not allow one to differentiate between adaptive evolution and relaxed selective constraint. Second, he argues that comparing polymorphism and divergence of synonymous and non-synonymous sites (see here) does not allow one to…

Sea Urchins and a Lesson in Taxonomy, Systematics, and Facts

In case you didn't hear, a sea urchin genome has been sequenced, analyzed, and the results published (Science has a page dedicated to it here). I say a sea urchin genome because there are many species of sea urchins. This paper reports the sequence of one species, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a model organism in developmental biology. Despite the fact they are quite common-place, genome sequencing projects still draw some attention in the popular science press (see the honeybee as an example). And, as usual, the articles written about this scientific study are fraught with errors and…

Blogging at Lawyerpoint : Intellectual Property Maximalism is Bad for Science

Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an article about a scientific result, with that result fully cited, it fully is fair use, even under the shrinking domain that remains within USA copyright law. Alas, when you are an individual graduate student, and the entity asserting that you're violating their copyright, knowledge that you are well within fair use is little comfort when you're faced the travesty that is our…

A highly revealing quote from a naturopath

Naturopathy is a strange beast in the "alternative medicine" world. From what I've been able to tell, it's a wastebasket specialty with no overarching philosophical underpinnings, as traditional Chinese medicine underpins acupuncture or sympathetic magic underpins homeopathy. Basically, if it's woo, naturopaths will use it. Acupuncture, TCM, homeopathy, herbalism, nutritional woo, detox, it doesn't matter. To naturopaths, it's all good, as long as it isn't "conventional medicine." Wait. Not quite. After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority…

CFI President Ronald Lindsay shows that he still doesn't get it on the "Ground Zero mosque"

Yesterday, I expressed my displeasure over a truly idiotic press release by the Center for Inquiry over the "Ground Zero mosque" entitled The Center for Inquiry Urges That Ground Zero Be Kept Religion-Free. I happen to know that a lot of supporters of CFI were very unhappy about the press release as well, because apparently the president of CFI, Ron Lindsay, is feeling the heat. Because I wrote to him complaining, I received the following mass response: Thank you for providing us with your comments concerning the recent press release issued by the Center for Inquiry on the Ground Zero…

It appears Mr. Stone doesn't even know what a corresponding author is

Remember my post about the genetics of autism last week? Remember how I predicted that the knives would come out from anti-vaccine loons? My original prediction was that Mark "Not a Doctor Not a Scientist" Blaxill would pull one of his usual brain dead attacks on genetic studies, such as his " immaculate mutations" gambit. I guessed wrong, apparently. It wasn't Mark Blaxill who went on the attack first. Although Blaxill hadn't tried his hand at a pseudoscientific deconstruction of this study as of Sunday afternoon, John Stone over at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has already…

Why is Linux Better?

Better than what you may ask? Better than: -Older versions of LInux ... it is always improving. -Windows. Hands down. -Apple's operating system before Apple chose, essentially, Linux (a Unix variant) to run its eye candy and development environment on But why, specifically, is it better? One reason, apparently, is because the Linux Kernel does not have a stable API. So what, you ask, is a Kernel and/or an API? Very simple: The Kernel is the guts, the most basic part, the way-down way-down of the operating system. What is the API? That stands for Application Programming Interface. The…

Does The Rite Have the Right Stuff?

As an ex-Catholic, I can appreciate a good movie involving Satin1 or his Minions. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, I get the jokes.2 Some of them are rather subtle and require an understanding of church dogma. Also, I can relate to the stranger side of the belief system from personal experience. When the book The Exorcist came out, everyone in my family read it, we all discussed it, and we considered the question: "Is it true or not?" And we decided that it was true. It probably helped that my cousin was a trained Exorcist, though I don't believe he ever actually…

Apple's Worst Idea Ever

Rumor has it that Apple is developing what is probably the worst idea ever. Now, I quickly add that when Apple yanked 3.5 inch floppies1 from all of their computer designs, I thought that was the worst idea ever, and it turned out to be the best idea ever. But this one, I don't know ... a mouse with a keyboard on it is not a good thing. Apple has shown interest in adding a display to its multi-touch Magic Mouse, adding interactivity and functionality to the wireless mouse for its Mac line of computers. Mice have had keyboard on them before. I've seen various Logitech devices with zillions of…

Don't blame the dinosaurs

The mammalian tree is rooted deeply and branched early! (click for larger image)All orders are labelled and major lineages are coloured as follows: black, Monotremata; orange, Marsupialia; blue, Afrotheria; yellow, Xenarthra; green, Laurasiatheria; and red, Euarchontoglires. Families that were reconstructed as non-monophyletic are represented multiple times and numbered accordingly. Branch lengths are proportional to time, with the K/T boundary indicated by a black, dashed circle. The scale indicates Myr. That's the message of a new paper in Nature that compiled sequence data from 4,510…

The people who like Obama more are smarter, female, non-white, not-Southern, not 'twix poor and rich, liberal dems godless and unmarried.

Modally speaking of course. And those are utterly different modes so the title of this post is of course nonsense. But, we do have some interesting data. This is from the Gallup Pole of weekly job approval by demographic groups. The main thing this poll shows is that Obama has high job approval ratings, and that his job approval ratings are high in relation to other presidents at this moment in their terms. George Bush's rankings, for his first term, dropped as all President's ratings seem to do, in an almost identical pattern as Obama's. Then, when Cheney/Bush allowed the attack on the…