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The Education Gap

The Times last weekend had a big article on the "achievement gap" in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a number of factors that might cause the gap. If you're a regular blog reader, you've probably already run across this, as it's been commented on locally by Jonah, Dave, and Jake, and on the wider Internet by a cast of thousands (see, for example, Matt Yglesias). It's…

Classic Shell Scripting

A repost, continuing along the lines of bashing the shell. Having examined Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (see here, here, and here), it is now time to turn to a more advanced reference to help you geek out on your Linux computer. If you want to have only one book on bash, get Classic Shell Scripting by Robbins and Beebe. This book has an excellent mixture of history, philosophy, rigorously described details and creative solutions. For instance, after giving a brief history of Unix (required in all such books) the authors layout the basic principles of what is…

How I learned to be an anti-Semite

I am not an anti-Semite. But I did learn how to be one in school. Catholic school, that is, which I attended for first, second, and third grade, in that order. I was reminded of this by a conversation with a cousin-in-law who had similar experiences. We exchanged our Catholic school stories at the recent Easter gathering. He was enjoying this exchange because his experience has been that people have not believed what he tells them about Catholic school, as it all seems so extreme. It is true that many Catholic school stories do sound unbelievable, or at least, they sound like jokes, and…

What is Multiplication, Really?

Via Mark Chu-Carroll, I just finished reading this article by mathematician Keith Devlin. He writes: Let's start with the underlying fact. Multiplication simply is not repeated addition, and telling young pupils it is inevitably leads to problems when they subsequently learn that it is not. Multiplication of natural numbers certainly gives the same result as repeated addition, but that does not make it the same. Riding my bicycle gets me to my office in about the same time as taking my car, but the two processes are very different. Telling students falsehoods on the assumption that they can…

Quantum Monty

The big Monty Hall book is rapidly coming together. I may even have the first draft done in the next few weeks. It's certainly been a lot more work than I expected when I began. Originally I envisioned a straight math book, where each chapter would present a different variation of the problem followed by a discussion of the sorts of mathematics needed to solve it. To a large extent it is still that, but I was a bit taken aback by the sheer quantity of academic literature that has been produced on the subject. My bibliography is likely to contain more than a hundred items. A discussion…

Tools of the Cold-Atom Trade: Optical Lattices

Last time in our trip through the cold-atom toolbox, we talked about light shifts, where the interaction with a laser changes the internal energy states of an atom in a way that can produce forces on those atoms. This allows the creation of "dipole traps" where cold atoms are held in the focus of a laser beam, but that's only the simplest thing you can use light shifts for. One of the essential tools of modern atomic physics is the "optical lattice," which uses patterns of light to make patterns of atoms. OK, what do you mean "patterns of light"? Well, remember, light has both wave and…

Experiment and Theory in the Popular Imagination

A little while back, I posted about the pro-theorist bias in popular physics, and Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a long and detailed response, which of course was posted on a day when I spent six hours driving to Quebec City for a conference. Sigh. Happily, ZapperZ and Tom at Swans On Tea offer more or less the response I would've if I'd had time and Internet connectivity. Tom in particular gives a very thorough exploration of some of the reasons why experiment gets downplayed in popular physics. I particularly liked this bit: I’m going to put forth a possibility: maybe we have a harder job, in…

Cincinnati, Part One

For me the big paleontology conference began on Wednesday morning when a group of us gathered to go to the Creation Museum. There were a couple of luminaries in attendence, including Eugenie Scott: If you look carefully you can make out my reflection in the glass. I have made several visits to the museum, and it has been crowded each time. But even I was taken aback by the mob scene that greeted us. Things were so clogged it was sometimes hard to work your way through the labyrinth of exhibits. Very depressing. Even more depressing was the ubiquity of small children from various…

Continuity, Discretion, and the Perils of Popularization

Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere. I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer. So, what's the issue? The…

Rapamycin - the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice

It's 1964, and a group of Canadian scientists had sailed across the Pacific to Easter Island in order to study the health of the isolated local population. Working below the gaze of the island's famous statues, they collected a variety of soil samples and other biological material, unaware that one of these would yield an unexpected treasure. It contained a bacterium that secreted a new antibiotic, one that proved to be a potent anti-fungal chemical. The compound was named rapamycin after the traditional name of its island source - Rapa Nui. Skip forward 35 years and rapamycin has made a…

Preconscious Processing and Entrepreneurial Alertness

I caught this neuroscience question over at a new blog I like, Think Markets. Sandy Ikeda comments on a section of Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness: I've been thinking about the following from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness: Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyze just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: "Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now? [...] As such, our brains are designed to…

On Source Code and the ethics of the modern technological era

[I am totally confused. I have not seen the movie Source Code, although it will be playing in Morris next week, yet I have now seen an explanation of the time-travel paradox in the movie by the physicist James Kakalios, and now here is an explanation by an English professor. You guys sort it out. I'm not going to try to read either of them carefully, until I see the movie. Which is already giving me a headache.--pzm] "On Source Code and the ethics of the modern technological era" By Brendan Riley Spoiler Alert: this essay assumes you've seen Source Code or don't mind having the plot revealed…

Tracing a Critical Path Through Human Memory

To enhance any system, one first needs to identify its capacity-limiting factor(s). Human cognition is a highly complex and multiply constrained system, consisting of both independent and interdependent capacity-limitations. These "bottlenecks" in cognition are reviewed below as a coherent framework for understanding the plethora of cognitive training paradigms which are currently associated with enhancements of working memory, executive function and fluid intelligence (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, c.f. 11, 12, 13). By far, the most common complaint about limitations in cognition is…

November Scientiae: Trick or treat!

Hello, and welcome to the November edition of Scientiae! The month of October was filled with tricks and treats galore; costumes were donned, and a rollicking good time was had by all. Or at least most. Or some. Anyway, read along to find out who got treated, who got tricked, and who's still figuring out what costume to wear to the ball. (Note: I've included all of the posts for the October Scientiae as well. Oddly enough, I was able to fit them all into this month's theme, so thanks to you all for writing such malleable posts!) TREATS Being a theorist is a treat! So says new blogger…

Those Cheating Testicles, or Who's Your Baby?

Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well. Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique: When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…

Obstructing Science in the Senate - Only You Can Stop It

As of this morning, it appears that the nominations of both John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco (the President's picks for Science Advisor and NOAA Administrator, respectively) are still stalled in the Senate. If we don't raise more hell over this issue - and keep raising hell - it's likely that these nominees will remain stuck in limbo for quite some time, and the Administration's efforts to forge a new science and environmental policy will be hampered as a result. Do you want that to happen? The issue is receiving relatively little attention from the traditional press, but one report…

Applications of Evolution 1: The Erythrina Gall Wasp

This is a repost: Unlike some of the folks here, there really aren't that many of my articles over at the old blog that I thought were worth bringing over here. This is one of the exceptions. It's the first post in a series about the effects of a new invasive insect species on an endemic tree found in Hawaii. I'll be bringing the remaining posts in the series over here over the course of the next week or so. Once I've moved them all over here, I'll post an update on the entire situation. This article was originally posted on the old blog on 16 August, 2005. I have not updated this post in…

Explaining religion 4 - Wolves and gods

The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf to man". I'm beginning to wonder if there is a difference between gods and wolves. Ask yourself this: why did we domesticate wolves instead of cats the way we did? Why don't we have pet tigers? The answer has to do with the social structure of wolves. They have a pack-mentality. Each wolf is subordinate to some other wolf unless it is the alpha male. This instinctual behaviour, typical of the species and its…

Living With Wolves

A lone female elk in the morning fog near Grizzly Lookout. I had heard one of the Hayden Valley wolf packs in this area just a few minutes before taking this photo. While traveling through Yellowstone National Park I was struck by the way in which the park's wilderness is being reshaped and redefined every day. Yellowstone workers and administrators have engaged in a herculean effort to restore the wildness of the nation's first national park, from the celebrated reestablishment of the bison herds to the cessation of bear feeding at park garbage dumps, but there still are tensions between…

Two modest proposals

The ghost of Larry Summers (I know! And he isn't even dead yet!) has risen again, with John Tierney of the NY Times "daring" to consider the notion that maybe women aren't as mathy as men. There's a lot to object to in his story, from the title (Sorry, John, but it isn't daring to promote a stereotype at all) to the feeble caveat at the end, where he says he willing to consider "possible social bias against women" in the sciences. "Possible"? Really? Say it ain't so, John! But no, let's cut straight to the heart of the issue. The problem here is sneaky sleight of hand. Here's what everyone in…

The pros and cons of screening mammography: reading my 'patient instructions'.

Connected to my last post (and anticipated by my razor-sharp commenters), in this post I want to look at the pros and cons of routine screening mammography in women under age 50, drawing on the discussion of this subject in the multi-page "patient instructions" document I received from my primary care physician. The aim of screening mammography is to get information about what's going on in the breast tissue, detecting changes that are not apparent to the eye or to the touch. If some of these changes are the starts of cancer, the thought is that finding them sooner can only be better,…

Dealing with plagiarism once the horse is out of the barn.

Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves -- paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source. Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn't seem to…

#scio10 preparation: Profiles in civility (or, do we agree on whether particular interactions are respectful?)

Coming up with a good definition is hard. And it's not obvious that people are even really talking about the same thing when they identify an action or a situation as displaying civility or incivility. So I'm wondering what kind of insight we can get by looking at some particular situations and deciding which side of the line it feels like they belong on. Before I put the situations on the table, let me be transparent about how I'm making my calls: I'm going to be asking myself whether it feels like the people involved are showing each other respect, and I'm going to make a special effort to…

Santa Claus and ethics.

It's time for Dr. Free-Ride to have a chat with the grown-ups. If you're a kid and you're reading this, think how much the adults in your life would appreciate it if you got up from the computer and put away your stuff that needs putting away (or played with your brother or sister nicely, or folded some socks). I'll have a post with some neat-o pictures in it up in a few hours. OK, just grown-ups here? Let's chat about the man in red. Issue #1: Is opting into the Santa thing ethical? This issue was raised in a comment on the New York Times Motherlode blog: Lies. Just lies. Though the child…

More on "integrating" pseudoscience with science

Naturopathy is at least 99% woo. That has to be said at the outset. Naturopaths might brag about all the science they take in naturopathy school, claiming that it's as much as MDs take. Even if that were true, the question is not how many hours of basic science naturopaths take, but rather what's taught in those hours and, more importantly, what's taught in the clinical hours. For instance, given that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, it implies that what's taught in basic science classes in naturopathy school allows room for the incredible magical quackery that is homeopathy to…

Reiki versus dogs just being dogs

Let me start right here by repeating yet again my oft-repeated assessment of reiki. Reiki is clearly nothing more than faith healing that substitutes Eastern mysticism for Christianity. Think of it this way. In faith healing, the faith healer claims to channel the healing power of God into the person being healed. In reiki, the reiki master claims to be able to channel "life energy" from what they refer to as the "universal source." Big difference, right? Wrong. It's the same thing. Let me also point out that, as much as I detest quackery, I'm particularly not a big fan of subjecting innocent…

Quackademic Medicine at Jefferson University Hospitals

I detest the term "integrative medicine," which is what promoters of "alternative medicine" pivoted to call "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) when they decided that they needed to lose the word "alternative" altogether. After all, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be "complementary" to real medicine because "complementary" implied a subsidiary position and they wanted to be co-equals with physicians and science- and evidence-based medicine. The term "integrative medicine" (IM) served their purpose perfectly, and "integrative medicine"…

Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis

One of the stranger Internet-based quackery phenomena of the last decade is Morgellon's disease. This is a topic I haven't visited that much on this blog, its having last come up in a big way a little more than a year ago, when I discussed it in the context of Dr. Rolando Arafiles and the other quackery he was promoting. This led to extreme unhappiness on the part of self-proclaimed Morgellons disease "expert" Marc Neumann, who later bombarded me with threatening e-mail rants. In any case, whatever Morgellons disease is, its cause is almost certainly not what patients think it is, namely the…

The Woo Boat

File this one under the category: You can't make stuff like this up. (At least, I can't.) Let's say you're a die hard all-conspiracy conspiracy theorist and alternative medicine believer (a not uncommon combination). You love Alex Jones and Mike Adams and agree with their rants that there is a New World Order trying to suppress your rights. You strongly believe that vaccines not only cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, a shaken baby-like syndrome, autoimmune diseases, sudden ovarian failure, and even outright death but are a depopulation plot hatched by Bill Gates and the Illuminati…

The Skeptical Movement as a Dysfunctional Corporation with a Nightmare HR Problem

Just an idea ... not entirely work safe ... below the fold. Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this…

Ron Numbers, another tool of the religious establishment

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He's another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can't even follow through on his own chain of logic. Here's that reasonable beginning. Given the overwhelming scientific support for evolution, how do you…

Pulling reflexology out of one's nether regions

I can't think of a better way to start year seven on the ol' blog. Remember how I speculated that perhaps Age of Autism or NaturalNews.com would provide me with the first topic of my next year of blogging? It turns out that I was wrong. It didn't come from either of those sources, although I will reassure the antivaccine loons at AoA and Mike Adams at NaturalNews.com not to fear. I'll get to them soon enough. The Huffington Post, too, given that apparently Mark Hyman's back with his woo. In any case, AoA and Mike Adams may at times be utterly hilarious, but they can't compare to what readers…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Worldwide Wanker of Woo

Let me say right up front that I'm not entirely sure that the victim--I mean target; no, I mean subject--of this week's little excursion into the deepest darkest depths of woo is not a parody. That's the beauty of it. I've never heard of it before, but a little Googling brought me evidence that it may not be a parody, that the guy purveying it may actually believe it. I'll leave you to judge for yourself, or, if you've heard of this guy before, to chime in and let me know the deal. I'll also point out that parts of this website are not entirely safe for work. Actually, a couple of the pages…

Autism quackery at the University of Toronto? Say it ain't so!

Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn't, I'm going to make sure that he does. I'm also guessing that he won't be pleased. He doesn't like pseudoscience at all. He detests "intelligent design" creationists. Based on that, I'm guessing that he won't like it at all to learn that the Canadian version of the autism "biomedical" antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One is metastasizing from its usual location in Chicago every Memorial Day to held at the University of Toronto in October, as this advertisement shows: If you live in Canada, the Northeastern United States, the…

Yet another attempt by Lott to rewrite history

I've discovered another one of John Lott's attempts to rewrite history. Read on. Lott has written a response to Kevin Drum's summary of Lott's model changing antics. Here's Drum: 1. Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws. 2. Back in April, two critics discovered that there were errors in the data Lott used. When the correct data was plugged into Lott's model, his results went away. 3. After a long silence, Lott admitted the data errors and posted a table with new…

Surgery and the "spread" of cancer: Tumor angiogenesis

I should know better. I really should. I'm referring, of course, to my having forgotten my usual avoidance of purely political posts yesterday. I'm beginning to remember why I so seldom blog about political matters in general and why I've never in two years discussed abortion on this blog in particular. I don't know what came over me. Given all that, I think it's high time for a straight science post, don't you? After all, I could beat up on Dr. Egnor again or do another dichloroacetate post, but what would be the point? Dr, Egnor's clearly an ideologue who is not likely to stop pushing "…

A death in the family

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on December 30, 2005, and I'm reposting it today because today marks one year since my uncle died. I rarely blog about…

One of the more annoying talk radio rants I've heard

Yesterday, on the way home, I was flipping through the AM dial. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, even now I still occasionally have a soft spot for conservative talk radio. At the risk of being shunned by my fellow ScienceBloggers (most of whom are--shall we say?--a bit to the left) and driving away half my traffic, I will even admit to having listened regularly to Rush Limbaugh for a period of several years back when I was in the lab fulltime. Say whatever you will about his views (which have tended to become more odious over the years), he was (and sometimes still is) a powerful and…

Color coding by religion in Iran?

I've written a lot before about the current President of Iran and his anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, as well as the religious fanaticism of the regime he leads. Here's more evidence of where theocracy can lead: While the Iranian economy appears to be heading for recession, one sector may have some reason for optimism. That sector is the garment industry and the reason for hopefulness is a law passed by the Islamic Majlis (parliament) on Monday. The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions…

Balloon and Blog

I watched the translucent white balloon, perhaps escaped from some baby shower or wedding, float against the clear blue sky. If it had been a cloudy day, I might not even have noticed it up there. It was one of those clear Colorado days, with nothing to stop the incessant waves of heat, pouring from the sun. One of those days when it feels so hot that you think your skin might melt (instead of burning crisp and red.) There were no signs of rain or breeze, from horizon to horizon... except that balloon. If you ask a young child to draw a picture of a balloon, they will draw a circle with a…

A Bonobo in the Hand or Two Chimps in the Bush?

Bonobo Week continues! I'm donating whatever proceeds I receive from my blogging shenanigans for the entire month of June to help the bonobos at Lola Ya Bonobo. Imagine that you're wandering in the desert and you come across two magic lamps. One lamp grants three wishes. It's your standard sort of magic lamp with a genie in it. (No wishing for extra wishes, of course.) The second magic lamp is, well, a moody magic lamp. It's inconsistent. Sometimes it grants one wish, and sometimes it grants seven wishes. But the thing is, you don't know for sure whether, when you rub the lamp and genie pops…

On Quantum Mechanics : Stochastic is Not the Opposite of Deterministic

Most of the misconceptions about and misuses of quantum mechanics (QM) comes a misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of QM. In the 20th century, as we came to understand that QM is how the world works on a fundamental level, we had to abandon the idea that physics was in principle deterministic. Alas, too many have read too much into this abandonment. Recently, one of the typical creationist nutters was commenting on the Gonzales tenure denial, and had this to say: Now, materialism is shot to pieces anyway, and has been ever since quantum mechanics began to be understood. Er, no. But…

Andrew Wakefield dives into even more disrepute

It has now been nearly two months since Andrew Wakefield was forced to resign from Thoughtful House in the wake of his being found guilty of research misconduct by the British General Medical Council (GMC), the withdrawal of Wakefield's infamous 1998 Lancet paper, and the withdrawal of Wakefield's last grab at scientific credibility, his infamous hepatitis B "monkey study." After a period of silence, over the last week, Wakefield has started to pop up in the public eye again, most recently last week in an interview for an independent filmmaker that is getting wide play in the anti-vaccine…

Mike Adams attacks Jimmy Kimmel for "hate speech"

The last couple of days have been unrelentingly serious and depressing, with posts on the (probably) preventable death of a young Australian woman named Jess Ainscough of a rare cancer because she made the mistake of choosing the quackery that is the Gerson protocol rather than conventional medicine. Unfortunately, the "natural health community" will almost certainly learn nothing from her story, in which Ainscough, facing the very unpleasant prospect of a radical amputation, instead chose Gerson therapy and became an evangelist for that particular form of cancer quackery and "natural healing…

Traditional Chinese medicine: Compare China with the U.S.

I've written quite a few times, both here and elsewhere, about the sham that is known as "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM). Basically, there is no such thing as TCM per se. There were in the distant past many "traditional Chinese medicines," various folk medicine traditions that, contrary to what is taught now, did not form a cohesive system of medicine that worked. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong, unable to provide "Western" science-based medicine to all of his people, popularized Chinese folk medicine as "traditional Chinese medicine" and exported it to the world…

Time for the metal mask again: The Egnorance that is ignorance returns, and Orac is not pleased

You may remember from yesterday that I wrote about a concerted propaganda effort by antivaccinationists to torture the facts and science behind a case of a girl with a rare mitochondrial disease whose condition may have been exacerbated by vaccination, resulting in an encephalopathy with some autism-like symptoms. Actually, I had had in mind an entirely different topic for yesterday, but news events drove me. Basically, I couldn't stand all the B.S. I saw emanating from antivaccinationists on news broadcasts and radio, and I had to do my little part to counter it. Fortunately (or…

Millennials and CAM use: Some depressing news

After having returned from TAM, I was pumped up by how much interest was shown in the case of Stanislaw Burzynski. More importantly, I was heartened to learn while I was there that the Texas Medical Board had submitted an amended complaint against him containing 202 pages worth of charges. Sure, the descriptions of the violations Burzynski committed in the care of seven patients cited got a bit repetitive, but that’s Burzynski. His MO has been consistent for 37 years, the only change being that in 1997 he decided to use and abuse the clinical trial process as a means to an end, that end being…

When antivaccinationists play on Mothering.com

Antivaccinationists irritate me, for reasons that should be obvious to regular readers. The reason is that vaccine-preventable diseases can kill. Contrary to the beliefs of many nonvaccinating parents, who downplay these diseases as being not particularly dangerous, they are dangerous. Of these, one of more dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases is pertussis. That's why a story that popped up in my Facebook feed disturbed me so. Unsurprisingly, it's on that other wretched hive of scum and quackery (with respect to vaccines), Mothering.com: So, my almost ten month old started coughing and…

The mummer's farce that was the Congressional autism hearing last week

Last Wednesday, I took note of an "old friend" and (thankfully) soon-to-be ex-Representative from Indiana's 5th Congressional District, organized quackery's best friend in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dan Burton. Specifically, I noted that Rep. Burton appeared to be having his one last antivaccine hurrah in the form of a hearing about the "autism epidemic" in which it was clear that vaccines were going to feature prominently. Fortunately, this quackfest took place a mere five weeks before his long and dismal tenure in Congress. I also noted how antivaccine groups, in particular the…

HuffPo now has a science section, and I remain skeptical that it changes anything.

It's no secret that I've been highly critical of The Huffington Post, at least of its approach to science and medicine. In fact, it was a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington launched her blog back in 2005 that I noticed something very distressing about it, namely that it had recruited someone who would later become and "old friend" (and punching bag) of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, as well as the mercury militia stalwart David Kirby, among others. As a result, antivaccination lunacy was running rampant on HuffPo, even in its infancy. Many, many, many more examples followed very quickly.…