Search Content

Displaying results 53801 - 53850 of 87947

IBM Watson: Not living up to hype as a tool to fight cancer?

For nearly as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Jeopardy! Indeed, if I'm at home at 7:30 PM on a weeknight, Jeopardy! will usually be on the television. Given that, I remember what was basically a bit of stunt programming in 2011, when Jeopardy! producers had IBM's artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson face off against two of the most winning champions in the history of the show, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won, leading Jenning's to add to his Final Jeopardy answer, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." Watson's next challenge was similarly highly hyped:…

Acupuncturists mistake insufficient rigor for bias against them

Of all the modalities of alternative medicine currently in use, arguably acupuncture is the one that has achieved the most mainstream acceptance in medicine. I've often asked why it has become so common in academic medical centers and elsewhere, despite the evidence being overwhelmingly in favor of the conclusion that it is nothing more than a theatrical placebo. It doesn't matter that acupuncture is part of a prescientific system of medicine now known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), whose concepts are rooted in vitalism. It doesn't matter that what has passed for acupuncture since the…

Evolution's Arrow

The evolution of life on earth has no direction and no predetermined end; what is adaptive today might not be tomorrow, and the scores of extinct creatures preserved in the rocks of this planet attest to an ongoing process that results in what Charles Darwin rightly called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." The man hailed as the co-discover of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, would not agree with my opening remarks, though. While Wallace contributed much to biological science in his own right, the incorporation of anthropocentric spiritualism into his hypotheses…

Woodward in Washington D.C. Part Four.

Woodward closed by gushing about Ralph Seelke, who is a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. His web page carries a large disclaimer that his views do not represent the views of the university. That's never a good sign. The site also has various pro-ID articles and links. He mentions three of his favorite books: Reason in the Balance and Darwin on Trial, both by Phillip Johnson, and The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross. Get the idea? Woodward was very excited about Seelke's work on tryptophan, which he described as an experimental test of evolution. It was a bright…

The Balance of Screening Tests

As you've no doubt heard by now, there's been a new recommendation issues which proposes changing the breast-cancer screening protocol for women under 50, by eliminating mammograms for women who don't have significant risk factos. While Orac has done a terrific job of covering this here and here, I wanted to throw in a couple of notes and a personal perspective. To begin with, there's a bit of math which has been bandied about, and I thought I'd just quickly walk through it. When you look at things like screening programs, what you're doing is performing some kind of test on a very large…

Book Review: The Faith Equation (part 1)

A few weeks ago, I received an email about a new book, "The Faith Equation", by Marvin Bittinger. Bittinger is an author of math textbooks - including, I think, my first calculus text. The book is supposed to be Bittenger's explanation of how mathematics validates christianity. Needless to say, I asked for a review copy - this is something right up my alley. I've taken longer to get around to reviewing it than I intended, but life's been busy lately. I'm going to review it in several parts: it's too dense, full of bad arguments of so many different kinds that I can't possibly do it justice…

The Bell Curve: Great Minds Think Alike-Gould and the Mad Biologist

OK, so my mind isn't as great as Stephen J. Gould's was, but when The Bell Curve was first published, I remember looking at the data appendices, and thinking, "These data are crap." A few years later, I found an essay by Gould in The Bell Curve Wars that made the same point, albeit more eloquently. So why bring this up? I've discussed the recent resurgence of idiotic statements about IQ and genetics, but something Atrios wrote about Saletan's recent missive bugged me (italics mine): You know, when Saletan went down his courageous racist road it at first didn't even occur to me to bother to…

The Politics of Cholera and of the Great White Bwana

One of the constant refrains I always hear is that diarrheal diseases, such as shigellosis, cholera, and other bacterial dysenteries, could be easily solved if there were adequate potable water and sanitation. That's completely correct. It's also completely unrealistic, as a recent editorial by Lorenz von Seidlein in Tropical Medicine & International Health argues. The problem is that this 'ultimate' solution of massive infrastructure investment often means that foreign governments and NGOs are discouraged from effective, short-term solutions. One such solution is the oral cholera…

Race mixing leading to obesity?

My post from a few weeks ago, Why does race matter for women?, elicited a lot of response (made it to the front page of Digg). Most of the open public discourse on race is bracketed in a few coarse frameworks; it is a social construction, and no one cares who is truly enlightened anymore, white racism keeps people of color down, etc. Though of utility in sloganeering I think most of these generalizations are such half-approximations that they mislead a great deal of time. So for example the interesting repeated finding that women in the United States are consistently more race conscious in…

Blue eyed devil!

Note: Download file here (it has more precise percentages on blue eyes in Norway, someone could try their hand at some game theoretic modeling if they were inclined, I lack the time right now). Ruchira Paul brought this article to my attention: Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child's eye color. It may just give you the answer you're looking for...Their studies...show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the…

Everything Senator Ted Cruz said about climate change in this NPR interview was wrong.

On December 9th, National Public Radio broadcast an interview between NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Senator Ted Cruz on the subject of climate change. Below is an annotated transcript of that interview with my [bracketed] responses to the consistently false scientific claims made by Senator Cruz. Effectively, every single scientific point he made was wrong – a classic “Gish Gallop” of long-debunked talking points of those who dispute the unambiguous scientific evidence of climate change. In these bracketed annotations I have provided a few hyperlinks to each of the myths he repeats. I have tried…

Rachel Carson's dream of a science-based agriculture may come as a surprise to those who believe that sustainability and technology are incompatible.

The ‘Frankenfoods’ debate is coming to your dinner table. Just last month, a mini-war developed in Europe, when the European Union’s chief scientist, renowned biologist Anne Glover, said that foods made through genetic engineering, such as soy beans—about 80 percent of US grown soybeans have been genetically engineered —are as safe as organic or conventional foods. It’s a wholly uncontroversial comment—at least among scientists. But it set off the usual scare mongering from Friends of the Earth, and other like-minded advocacy groups that finds all genetically engineered (GE) foods and crops…

Modeling antiviral resistance, VIII: finishing the rule book

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We need to finish the Methods section of the mathematical model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Then we can move on to Results. In this post we will deal mainly with paragraphs 3 and 4 of Methods on page 3…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? Thank you, Bora I am a lucky individual who was given a chance to exist, create and interact with other living beings on…

The Book Meme

This was the first of several book-related memes I did, back on April 05, 2005. Follow the responses of people I tagged as well. And if you have not done this version yet, and you like the questions, then feel tagged and post your answers on your blog... I was afraid this was going to happen. I tried to hide. But, of course, there is no hiding on the blogs, and it was bound to happen sooner or later. The dreaded "That Book Meme" has been passed on to me, by Eric Gordy of East Ethnia. So, here are my answers: You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? When I first saw…

New herbicide and GE seeds: EPA and USDA poised to approve herbicide with insufficiently unexamined cumulative and long-term health effects

If the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) give their approval to a new herbicide called Enlist Duo and to corn and soybean seeds genetically engineered (GE) to resist that chemical, the United States could see a significant increase in what is already one of the country’s most widely used herbicides. Yet while the EPA seems poised to approve Enlist Duo and USDA, the GE seeds, about 50 members of Congress have written to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack expressing their “grave concerns” about “the multiple…

The Money Makes the Honey Taste Like Nothing: The Blogger's Dilemma and the Picket Line

Betcha giving head to a movie star betcha gotta llama riding in Your car betcha u gotta tv built in your jet skis, betcha giving Head to a movie star betcha gotta llama riding in your car Betcha u gotta tv built in your jet skis. Hidee high, lowdy low, get up and go to the show. Ain't it funny how the money makes the honey taste like nothing You can't have no more? Now we know. Ain't it funny how the Money makes the honey taste like nothing you can't have no More? Now we know. Ain't it funny how the money makes to Honey taste just like nothing - people act like they have but They're bluffing…

Out in the Oil with Captain Dave

By Elizabeth Grossman "I've never seen anything like it," says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years' experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "We're seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things," he tells me. "Things I've never seen before coming up from the deep that look like sea cucumbers floating dead. Man o' wars floating dead with shriveled tentacles." Willman is captain of the Noonie G., an 111-foot supply boat owned by Guilbeau Marine, a company based in Cut Off, LA. He's been working out of…

Doctors are conspiring to convince you you're sick!

How do doctors decide what is healthy and unhealthy? Do they arbitrarily decide on risk factors to line their pockets - creating false epidemics as Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science suggests? Or, is there actually a science, called epidemiology, that is the basis for health recommendations? As I've said repeatedly, one of the sure signs you're about to hear total BS is if someone suggests there is some conspiracy by scientists or doctors to hide the truth. In an article challenging the use of serum troponin levels to determine whether myocardial infarction (MI) has occurred (a more…

A conversation on smallpox and vaccination with Dr. William Foege

I can hardly do Dr. William Foege justice with a short introduction. He is one of the scientists who led the global smallpox eradication efforts. He developed the concept of ring vaccination, which targeted vaccination to those individuals around a known case of smallpox. This concept really made eradication possible, as it eliminated the need for universal vaccination.  Following the success of the smallpox campaign, he has worked tirelessly to increase global vaccination rates.  He led the effort to provide low-cost treatments for river blindness, resulting in an immense reduction in that…

Man Bites Dog? Corporations Ask for Regulation

By David Michaels Updated Below The lead story in todayâs New York Times reports something weâve been writing about here at the Pump Handle for quite some time (here and here and here, for example): responsible corporations recognize the need for public health and environmental regulation. In industry and after industry, corporations and trade associations are asking the Bush Administration for regulation. In some of these cases industry has realized that voluntary regulation has failed, and without mandatory regulation, consumers will reject their product. But some of the push for federal…

Do microwaves "nuke" the nutrients in food?

No. However, there is never a shortage of crankery from Mike Adams who asserts Microwave ovens destroy the nutritional value of your food. There may be too much idiocy here to address but let's get started. The rise of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the western world correlates almost perfectly with the introduction of the microwave oven. This is no coincidence. Microwave ovens heat food through a process of creating molecular friction, but this same molecular friction quickly destroys the delicate molecules of vitamins and phytonutrients (plant medicines) naturally found in foods.…

Britain, land of heart-stoppingly good dinosaur fossils

Yesterday the most remarkable thing happened. No, I have not been handed new DNA work on the Dufftown rabbit-headed cat, nor has the rest of Yaverlandia been found. An articulated azhdarchid has not been discovered on a Cretaceous savannah ashfield, nor have the islands of the SW Pacific yielded an assortment of ten new cursorial, durophagous and scansorial mekosuchine crocodiles. No, it's something far, far more significant than any of those things... Ok, it's not. Regular readers will be aware of one of the biggest proverbial thorns in my side: that bloody review paper on the British…

Functions, Types, Function Types, and Type Inference

Haskell is a strongly typed language. In fact, the type system in Haskell is both stricter and more expressive than any type system I've seen for any non-functional language. The moment we get beyond writing trivial integer-based functions, the type system inevitably becomes visible, so we need to take the time now to talk about it a little bit, in order to understand how it works. One of the most important things to recognize about Haskell's type system is that it's based on *type inference*. What that means is that in general, you *don't* need to provide type declarations. Based on how you…

Is Evolution Good Enough? It Beats Us.

One of the bad arguments that I've frequently seen from creationists is the argument that some biological system is *too good* to be a possible result of an evolutionary process. On its face, this seems like it's not a mathematical argument. But it actually is, and math is key to showing what the argument really is, and what's wrong with it. Let's look at an example of this argument. Last week, on the "ID the Future" blog, Cornelius Hunter posted an article titled ["Design Science"][hunter] using exactly this argument: >Darwinists say that evolution created the many biological marvels such…

Tet Zoo = 4 years old today

Today is January 21st which means, believe it or don't, that it's Tet Zoo's birthday, the 4th no less. Holy crap... have I really been blogging for four years? Yikes, and there is still so much to do, so little ground I've covered. This is despite more than 635 (count 'em) Tet Zoo articles here on ScienceBlogs alone. As on some (but not all) of the previous occasions, this article is going to be a personal look back at the year, not a proper review of all the Tet Zoo-relevant stuff that happened in 2009 (wow, wish I had time for that). Actually, this is just about the worst time to write a…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 27 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Pure Ultrasonic Communication in an Endemic Bornean Frog: Huia cavitympanum, an endemic Bornean frog, is the first amphibian species known to emit exclusively ultrasonic (i.e., >20 kHz) vocal signals. To test the…

Bait and Switch

tags: book review, white-collar unemployment, job hunting, Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich While I was flying back to NYC last weekend, I read (yet another) book about job hunting. This book detailed the obvious; that searching for a white-collar job is not as easy as you might think, as you'll learn in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich (NYC: Metropolitan Books; 2005). In this book, Ehrenreich posed as an unemployed white-collar worker, in search of a job in public relations and event planning. To avoid being identified as a journalist via a…

Birds in the News 131

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Yellow-Throated Laughing Thrush, Garrulax galbanus. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Birds in Science News A team of researchers recently described fossils from two Lower Eocene parrots that were discovered in Denmark. Analysis of the fossils reveals that one of the ancient parrots, named Mopsitta tanta, is the largest fossil parrot found so far and it has the most northerly distribution yet known. Further, it resembles modern parrots almost as closely as younger fossils found from the Miocene, making it the…

Just How Smart Are Ravens?

tags: ravens, intelligence, behavior, birds, ornithology Common Raven, Corvus corax. Image: John James Audubon. Some of you know that Bernd Heinrich has spent many winters studying ravens and their behavior. This month, Heinrich and his colleague, Thomas Bugnyar, published an article in Scientific American that explores the intelligence of ravens. In this article, they investigate the question; do the birds consciously contemplate alternative behaviors and choose the most appropriate ones, or are they merely relying on instinct or learning to perform specific actions by rote? They begin by…

33 hours, 3 Toxic Releases, 1 Fatality: All preventable, says Chemical Safety Board of January 2010 incidents at DuPont Belle, West Virginia plant

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 23, 2010, Carl "Danny" Fish, a 32-year employee of the DuPont plant in Belle, West Virginia was performing a routine operation when a hose carrying phosgene (a chemical so toxic it was used as a weapon during World War I) ruptured, spraying him in the face and chest. Fish was rushed to the hospital. He died the night of January 24. Two workers who attended to Mr. Fish were also exposed to phosgene but apparently without any lasting impact. What initially sounded like a freak accident turns out to have been but one in a series of equipment failures that,…

Award-winning Writing About Cancer

The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced its 2010 award winners, and I found it striking that three of the winning pieces address the issue of cancer. Over the past couple of years, we've heard more cautions about the downsides of aggressive screening for breast and prostate cancers - and then we occasionally also hear about the relatively young man or woman whose cancer is caught and treated early thanks to such aggressive practices. At the population level, we compile statistics about risk and survival rates, but those are easy to forget about when someone we love gets the…

Force F from outer space

Most normal people would have been content to have produced one game-changing theory of climate but David Evans is not a normal person. No! He has squillions of degrees from Really Prestigious universities and has, on his own, invented entire new types of Fourier analysis. So it is with no surprise - rather, with a dull grey sense of the inevitable - that I note (thank you JM and ATTP) that his latest theory has thunked onto the doormat like junk mail. ATTP attempts to make some sense of DE's confusion over partial derivatives - they're the work of the devil I tell you - and I'll try to…

What I think about global warming

A reader wrote: I am a recent reader of your blog Stoat. I am very interested in the Climate Change issue but I am not a scientist. I read Joe Romm, Island of Doubt and General news about the subject. You are the first expert I have come across that seems to have a balanced opinion on climate change. I have searched through your archives but I can't really get a complete feel of what your opinion is. I get lost sometimes when you explain the technical stuff or use abbreviations for things that I don't know what the abbreviations are for. Could you do a blog post (in an untechnical format…

Messier Monday: A Spiral with an Active Black Hole, M106

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself." -Thomas Szasz But on this Messier Monday, you're lucky enough that you're about to be introduced to one of the great northern galaxies of the Messier catalogue that is feeding itself! There are 110 deep-sky, non-transient objects that make up the Messier catalogue, and a full 40 of them are galaxies, the most numerous and most distant of all the types of objects catalogued by Messier. Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of http://www.lex.sk.ca/astro/messier/index2.…

Comparing models and empirical estimates Part II: interview with Brown

I recently posted an overview of a new climate study, Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise, by Patrick T. Brown, Wenhong Li, Eugene C. Cordero & Steven A. Mauget. That study is potentially important because of what it says about how to interpret the available data on global warming caused by human generated greenhouse gas pollution. Also, the since publication the study has been rather abused by climate contrarians who chose to interpret it very inaccurately. This is addressed in this item by Media Matters. My…

Harry Potter and the 2014 Election

The Potter Metaphor Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the first in a series of books that are metaphorical of the central theme of politics and society in the Western world. Voldemort represents purity of race and racism, the good Witches and Wizards of Hogwarts represent the struggle of self aware consensus around the idea of fairness. The key protagonists -- Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley, together with a few others -- succeed because of the diversity in ability they collectively represent. One of the key moments in J. K. Rowling’s book is the solution of the potions…

Good Morning, America. There is another Ebola case. UPDATED

UPDATE: The first health worker to have been affected with Ebola in Texas may not be moved to Maryland. From NBC: Nina Pham, one of the two nurses who contracted Ebola in Dallas, is expected to be moved to a National Institutes of Health isolation unit in Bethesda, Maryland, a federal official with direct knowledge of the plans told NBC News on Thursday. The transfer could happen later Thursday, but the official cautioned that plans were evolving. Pham, 26, was diagnosed with the virus on Sunday after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted Ebola in Liberia, flew to Dallas and later died…

The Great Human Race: How to survive

The Great Human Race is a new production of National Geographic, in three parts. I recently viewed the first episode, "Dawn" which comes with this description: All people can trace their roots to the savanna of East Africa, the home of one of the first members of the human species -- Homo habilis. Archaeologist Bill Schindler and survival instructor Cat Bigney face what early man did as they work together to survive in the wild savanna just as these primitive people did 2.6 million years ago -- without any weapons or fire. But they soon find that living like our ancestors is harder than…

The End Of America The Free, America The Brave

Putin probably owns Trump. In the past, Trump has spent enough high profile time traveling in and out of Russia, that any smart intelligence agency would have long ago gotten the goods on such a sloppy self absorbed person. Assume there are movies. Young girls. Whatever. Putin probably owns Trump. The ex KGB officer probably owns a lot of people, a lot of foreign rich or influential individuals. That's how these things work. Trump is a man that relies on the image of great personal wealth. But, if he has great personal wealth it is a mere couple of billion or so. Alternatively, he may…

Do-nothing atheists and re-igniting the Enlightenment

I'll take a leaf from Chris Ho-Stuart's book and urge you to read this post on Positive Liberty before I tackle his post. Jonathan Rowe is making the useful point that we have an interest in shaping religions, even religions with which we do not agree, to make them compatible with a civil, democratic society. He points out that the US founding fathers put an Enlightenment twist on the Christianity they favored, rejecting old notions of exclusivity and intolerance to promote a more benign form of religion — without actually establishing a state religion, they at least exemplified some broader-…

From Ladysmith to London: A Harrowing Escape

In late November, 1899, a British military unit which included an embedded reporter was ambushed by an Afrikaner unit in what is now Natal Province, South Africa. This was during the Anglo-Boer war, which was to be the largest military adventure to date in the history of the United Kingdom. The British had been traveling in an armored battle train, a kind of tank-train hybrid that was being used in that war mostly with poor results. The train was partly derailed, and the British were under fire, their only hope to make a break for it, or to hunker down and wait for reinforcements which may…

Critique of Rebecca Watson's Talk: Haters gonna hate.

Whinging About Skepchick A critique of a talk by Rebecca Watson is very likely heavily influenced by the critiquer’s membership in one group or another as defined by The Great Sorting. This not because Rebecca is a polarizing person. It is because she has been outspoken on issues that tend to polarize people, like feminism. This polarization is enhanced by the fact that a break-off group of skeptics have chosen to join the haters rather than the thinkers and doers. Also, she leads a group of women who have tried to open up the Skeptical Community to having more female participants and to more…

The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder

Yesterday, I was reading a good article in the October 2004 issue of Wired: "The crusade against evolution", by Evan Ratliff. It gives far more column space to the voices of the Discovery Institute than they deserve, but the article consistently comes to the right conclusions, that the Discovery Institute is "using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny." Along the way, the author catches Stephen Meyer red-handed in misrepresenting Carl Woese (by the clever journalistic strategem of calling Carl Woese), and shows how the DI's favorite slogans ("Teach the controversy" and "academic…

Which is more likely to be real, Ghosts or Martians?

Do ghosts really exist? Is there life on Mars? Despite what one might think, what with large class sizes and the homogenization of culture caused by TV and Fast Food, the fact remains that clumps of high school students organized into classes can vary widely from one another. Each year has its own characteristics, and each classroom-sized bunch of them, taking a particular course together, can be very different from the next. A teacher I know has ended up this year with a science class with a large proportion of students who believe that ghosts are real, and while they are at it, they also…

Back When I Was a Kid, We Had Real Winters!

March is the snowiest month. We get lots of snow in December. Sometimes it is too cold to snow. When I was a kid (whenever that was) there were more snow storms, the total snow cover was much, much deeper, and when it snowed...it snowed, by golly! Such are a few of the things people say about the weather. Of special interest to me is the idea that "these days" have less snow than "those days"...according to every one of every age of every region that gets snow. Have you ever thought this? Have you ever heard this said? If you live in a region that gets snow in a regular basis, and this does…

Myron Ebell, Evil Arch Climate Uber Villain

It has been drawn to my attention that Myron Ebell will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy. Not everyone is entirely happy about this3 and doubtless Trump will be distressed by that, but he is unlikely to take this unexpected opposition too seriously. Scratching my head and trying to think of a contrarian way to approach the matter, I thought I'd try reading what he has actually said, instead of reading what other people who don't like him say. First of all, slightly to my…

Are Tsunamis Intelligently Designed?

In the wake of a deadly earthquake-triggered tsunami that has killed at least 77,000 people in southern Asia, brave scientific dissenters are standing up to the Wegenerian Orthoxody that has for so long censored and belittled anyone who dares to question the validity of Naturalistic Seismology. For decades, scientists have told us that they understood the processes that cause earthquakes. In high school science textbooks, they dazzle unsuspecting students with tales of tectonic plates shifting and so-called "continental drift". But new evidence shows that these processes are infinitely more…

Dover School District Wades Into Troubled Waters

The long-awaited decision of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania regarding evolution and intelligent design has finally been released to the public (press release found here). It's a policy that virtually guarantees legal action that the school district will lose. Let's take a look at the statement. After noting that their biology classes will be using the Prentice-Hall textbook Biology as their primary textbook, they said: The district also received as a donation 60 copies of Of Pandas and People and the book is now listed as a reference book in the curriculum. It is not a…

The Mike Brown Saga Deepens

Paul Campos has an article in the New Republic (registration required, but available on bugmenot) about FEMA director Mike Brown. I've written before, as have many others, about Brown's complete lack of qualifications for that position, which he got only because his former college roommate hired him as his assistant. But Campos reveals that, if anything, we've been too charitable to him: To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown's biography on fema's website reports…