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Going out with a Bangs: Control of Human Brucellosis by means of an Animal Vaccine

This is the thirteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Jessica Ludvik.  One Disease, Many Species Brucellosis, more commonly known as undulant fever in humans or bangs disease in cattle, is one of the oldest bacterial scourges of livestock-producing nations, especially those in which the animals live in close proximity with the human population.  The disease is caused by bacteria of the genus Brucella.  Within this category are many species of bacteria, each almost exclusive to a particular animal species.  A few of the most common seen in veterinary and human medicine today are…

Atypical Typhus

This is the third of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Mary Egan. Murine typhus has been in the news recently in Austin, TX, where in May of this year, two people were found to be positive and one died.  This rings a number of alarm bells for me, since I live in Texas, and specifically in Austin.  I know of another Austin veterinarian who got sick with murine typhus in 2008, when it was first noticed in Austin and investigated by the CDC.  I was also working as a relief vet at the Town Lake Animal Center, the municipal shelter, and at the Austin Humane Society, the main nonprofit adoption…

Influenza virologist Robert Webster stops by to talk shop

Readers who are regulars at Effect Measure or Deltoid will be familiar with the opinions of attorney and author Michael Fumento. Fumento considers himself an avian flu "skeptic," and recently issued a "challenge" (the title, "My avian flu challenge to the leftist bird-brained squawkers", might give you some clue as to its scientific value) to bloggers, in response to one blogger's comment that "... there was a "50%/50%" chance of [an influenza] pandemic in the next year": I took advantage of Mr. Paramedic's oversight to bet him 10-1, with him picking the dollar amount, that there would be…

Pressure Builds on the Bush Administration to Regulate Diacetyl

By David Michaels The popcorn festival has just ended in Marion, Ohio (nickname: âpopcorn capital of the worldâ), attended by more than 100,000 revelers. The Orville Redenbacher Parade is one of the festivalsâ highlights. Redenbacher, who developed the hybrid corn strain that pops so uniformly, was actually from Indiana, but ConAgra Foods manufactures the best selling microwave popcorn brand âOrville Redenbacherâsâ (along with Act II brand) at its factory in Marion. I didnât get to the festival, but you can be sure that there was a lot of talk about the first reported case of âpopcorn lungâ…

It's a small world, after all

[From the archives; originally posted November 28, 2005] Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it's something that's kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections. Many of you have probably heard of the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks," by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his "lost…

Storm World

I've been reading Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming for the last week or so, and I've got to say, this is excellent science writing. A book on science for the non-expert reader should accomplish 5 things. It should let you know the history of the field and its prevailing theories, it should give you background and explanations that allow you to attain a basic grasp of the science or key concepts, it should be well-written, it should make you care about the subject, and it should be entertaining. Mooney gets a 5/5. It also was highly…

Jonathan Wells gets everything wrong, again

I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells' visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells' version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea. The next person--apparently a professor of developmental biology--objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve…

The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: The Math Geeks are Coming to Town!

Please make sure you read to the end. A couple of late submissions didn't get worked into the main text, and a complete list of articles is included at the end. Oy. So I find myself sitting in my disgustingly messy office. And I've got a problem. The Math Carnival is coming to town. All those geeks, and the chaos that they always cause. Oy. But I'm stuck. After all, I have student loans that need to be payed off early, and the kind of work I do doesn't exactly bring in as much cash as running an oil company. Besides, maybe I can talk someone who's been confused by all the math geekery into…

Carnivorous, worm-like amphibians invade London: 'The Secret World of Naked Snakes', part I

On Monday 7th December the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hosted the one-off event 'The Secret World of Naked Snakes' (part of the ZSL's 'communicating science' series): a whole meeting devoted entirely to those bizarre, poorly known, limbless, worm-like amphibians, the caecilians. The meeting was attended by over 100 people, which really isn't bad going, especially when some of the organisers expressed fears that the event would only be attended by (to quote David Gower) "A handful of caecilian freaks". Ken Livingstone [shown here] - former Mayor of London and well-known amphibian…

Throw out your Bibles and free yourselves from the shackles of delusional superstition!

I woke up this morning after a poor night's rest, with a surly brain and tired eyes, and what do I behold as I scan through the last few day's worth of email? Stories of faith that piss me off. So allow me to purge my demons by slapping around a few religious goofballs — it'll take the edge of my headache and lighten my step for the rest of the day. Don't worry, I'll start off easy and work up to the really bad ones. John Shelby Spong is giving some lectures. You know, I think I'd like Spong as a person, and I think he espouses some worthy humanist values, but jeez, he always comes off as a…

Basics: Biological Clock

Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time. Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold: A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 21 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, Mendeley, 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: Relationships of Cetacea (Artiodactyla) Among Mammals: Increased Taxon Sampling Alters Interpretations of Key Fossils and Character Evolution: Integration of diverse data (molecules, fossils) provides the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 23 awesome 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, Mendeley, 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: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed; How the Thermoacidophilic Archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus Responds to Oxidative Stress: To avoid molecular damage of biomolecules due to oxidation…

Basics: Biological Clock

Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time. Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold: A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…

Basics: Biological Clock

Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time. Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold: A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

There's some cool new stuff in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine this week. Here are my picks and you look around and see what you are interested in.... The Evolutionary and Developmental Foundations of Mathematics: Understanding the evolutionary precursors of human mathematical ability is a highly active area of research in psychology and biology with a rich and interesting history. At one time, numerical abilities, like language, tool use, and culture, were thought to be uniquely human. However, at the turn of the 20th century, scientists showed more interest in the numerical abilities of…

Steeplejacking

Why didn't I hear about this before? Why is it not in the media? On blogs? Lindsay reports on the new book "Steeplejacking" that documents how the Religious Right, hand-in-hand with the hawkish conservative Democrats, systematically, over the past couple of decades, performed hostile take-overs of liberal churches. Whenever a pastor/priest/whatever preached peace (and tolerance, equality, need to fight the environmental problems and problems of poverty, etc), the "Institute on Religion and Democracy" would move in and, using various heavy-handed tactics, including lawsuits, remove such…

Five Little Pieces of Paper

Take five little pieces of paper, and write down the five things that matter most to you in your life, whatever they are. Your parents. Your partner. Your kids, Your community. Your grand passion - art or the Red Sox, guitar or hunting or knitting. Your home. Your favorite chair. Your dreams for the future. Your best friends. Your free time. Prayer. Your dog, your cat. Your neighborhood, that place where everyone knows your name, your religious community, your buddies from work or school. Your music. Mint Milanos and a glass of wine with someone who understands you. That super-soft stuffed…

Want to learn about genetics? Play with molecular modeling? I need volunteers

Want to learn more about Parkinson's disease? See why a single nucleotide mutation messes up the function of a protein? I have a short activity that uses Cn3D (a molecular viewing program from the NCBI) to look at a protein that seems to be involved in a rare form of Parkinson's disease and I could sure use beta testers. If you'd like to do this, I need you to follow the directions below and afterwards, go to a web form and answer a few questions. Don't worry about getting the wrong answers. I won't know who you are, so I won't know if you answered anything wrong. If you have any concerns…

Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas

tags: book review, birds, birding, ornithology Gulls are found nearly everywhere, from their usual haunts on the shorelines of oceans, lakes and rivers, to newly tilled fields, garbage dumps and sewage treatment plants. Due to their ubiquity, they are popular among birdwatchers, but gulls are often challenging to identify because they can take up to four years to mature, and they have different plumages each year. They also have seasonal differences and individual variations in plumage as well. Further, considering that, for most people, one "seagull" looks just like all the others,…

Why Are Female Blue Tits Unfaithful?

tags: blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus, extrapair fertilization, genetic benefit hypothesis, genetic similarity, plumage color, birdsong, ornithology, behavioral ecology Blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus. Image: Paul Hillion, 26 April 2008. Even though most bird species form social bonds with their mates, they are not always faithful partners to each other. It's easy to figure out why male birds engage in extrapair copulations: this increases the total number of their offspring -- and this increases their reproductive fitness. But since female birds are physically capable of producing only…

Song and Plumage Evolution in New World Orioles

tags: evolution, birds, orioles, Icterus, research "Oriole." Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells. [Larger image]. I often think about differences in morphological and behavioral traits in closely-related species and wonder whether the speed and character of changes in these traits reveal anything about the evolutionary relationships between taxa. For example, in birds, both visual and auditory cues, such as plumage and song patterns, are essential for identifying members of their own species. However, these phenomena have rarely been…

The Creation "Museum" has given us warning

The Creation "Museum" is experiencing some dread and trepidation about our visit, and they have sent a letter to me and to the SSA expressing their concerns. These are some reasonable worries, given that there will be a huge number of us (240 and counting) showing up in one mass. Here's what they have to say, and my comment to all of you. Dr. Paul Myers (and the Secular Student Alliance)Biology Dept.University of Minnesota-Morris600 East 4th StreetMorris, MN 56267 Re: Creation Museum Visit - Notice of Policies Dear Dr. Paul ("P.Z.") Myers and the SSA: As the Security Manager for the…

Bridge To Opportunity (Reprise)

tags: NYC Life, Brooklyn Bridge, Emily Roebling, NYC history I have been watching the superb series of DVDs called New York, thanks to one of my currently vacationing pet sitting clients who owns it (now I wish to own this series too, so I can watch it over and over again). Because of this series, I was inspired to republish a story that I originally wrote in November 2004 about my adventure on the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn Bridge. Image: Henri Silbermann. Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares. (Chance favors the prepared mind.) - Louis Pasteur As…

New report confirms Texas' abysmal record on construction worker safety

by Kim Krisberg Texas may boast a booming construction sector, but a deeper look reveals an industry fraught with wage theft, payroll fraud, frighteningly lax safety standards, and preventable injury and death. In reality, worker advocates say such conditions are far from the exception — instead, they've become the norm. Such conditions were chronicled in a new in-depth report released earlier this week. Researchers, who surveyed nearly 1,200 construction workers in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and El Paso, found that one in five construction workers experienced a workplace injury…

Austin project successfully integrating workers' rights into larger sustainability goals

by Kim Krisberg When most of us think of sustainability and construction, the usual suspects probably come to mind: efficient cooling and heating, using nontoxic building materials, minimizing environmental degradation — in other words, being green. But in Austin, Texas, a new effort is working to expand the definition of sustainability from the buildings themselves to the hands that put them together. Launched about a year ago, the Workers Defense Project's Premier Community Builders program certifies major new developments as sustainable for workers. That means making sure construction…

Study: U.S. households that can’t afford water projected to grow by the millions

Can I afford the water that comes out of my tap? It’s not a question that Americans typically ask themselves. However, a new study finds that in the next few years, many more of us might be asking that very question as we open our utility bills and realize that we’re merely accustomed to affordable water — we don’t have a guaranteed right to it. While a good amount of research on water affordability has been conducted in the developing world, the issue has received much less attention in developed nations such as the United States. Elizabeth Mack, an assistant professor in the Michigan State…

Midnight regulations, Shmidnight shmegulations

Cross-posted from CPRBlog by James Goodwin In case you didn’t get the memo:  President Obama is entering the last year of his final term in office, so now we’re all supposed to be panicking over a dreaded phenomenon known as “midnight regulations.”  According to legend, midnight rulemaking takes place when outgoing administrations rush out a bunch of regulations during their last few days in order to burnish their legacy or make concrete several of their policy priorities in ways that would be difficult for a successor—presumably from a different party—to undo.  The legend further holds that…

Plant and animal development compared

Since I wrote about the wacky creationist who couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that plants and animals are related, and since I generally do a poor job of discussing that important kingdom of the plants (I admit it, I'm a metazoan bigot…but I do try to overcome my biases), I thought I'd briefly mention an older review by Elliot Meyerowitz that compares developmental processes in plants and animals. The main message is that developmental processes, the mechanisms that assemble the multicellular whole, are very different in the two groups and are non-homologous, but don't get confused:…

Roy Moore on HR 2679

Good ol' Judge Roy Moore, the Christian supremacist former Alabama supreme court justice, thinks HR 2679 (which I refer to as the Tonya Harding bill - if you can't beat the ACLU in court, hobble them on the way up the steps) is a dandy idea. And you're gonna love the hypocritical rhetoric he uses to defend that position. He begins with an inaccurate statement of history: The American Rule in lawsuits, which the United States Supreme Court stated in 1967, is that unless otherwise stated in the law or by contract, each party is responsible for paying its own attorneys' fees regardless of who…

SF Lawsuit: An Opinion, a Precedent, and a Contradiction

Eugene Volokh has a post about this suit, likely prompted by me bringing it up on his religion law listserv this morning, and he argues that it probably isn't unconstitutional but still troublesome. First amendment law is his specialty, so he's probably got a pretty firm grasp on it. I'm gonna take a fairly large quote from his post, so I'll begin below the fold: The San Francisco city government, it seems to me, is quite entitled to express its views on gay rights questions, and to condemn groups that, in its view, express "hateful" ideas. It's entitled to do this even when those groups are…

Should Conservative Christians Embrace Evolution?

Michael Shermer answers yes in his latest column for Scientific American. He conveniently organizes his arguments in a series of bullet points, and we will consider that momentarily. Shermer gave me my big break in the evolution biz by publishing my reviews of Ken Miler's Finding Drawin's God and John Haught's God After Darwin in Skeptic magazine. I'm usually a big fan of his writing. But in this case I'm afraid he is way off base. In fact, I have a nagging fear that he wrote this tongue-in-cheek, and that by writing a serious reply I am basically falling for a joke. Nonetheless, I will…

What is Infinity?

There's an interesting blog discussion going on about the age-old question of whether .99999..., where the nines go on forever, is actually equal to one. The answer is: Yes, it does, and if you think it does not then you are mistaken. Polymathematics got the ball rolling with several arguments establishing the equality of the infinite decimal on the one hand and the number one on the other. Mark Chu-Carroll offered some follow-up thoughts here. One way to prove that .9999... repeating equals one is to realize that the notation “.9999...” is really just a short-hand way of writing the…

Messier Monday: Messier's First Globular Cluster, M2

“God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.” -Bill Watterson Welcome back to another Messier Monday, only here on Starts With A Bang! With each new Monday, we take an in-depth look at a prominently visible random object from Messier's catalogue of 110 deep-sky curiosities, objects that range from stellar corpses to star-forming regions, to open clusters, globular clusters, distant galaxies, and even a few anomalies! Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Jim Cornmell and Zeimusu. The objects in Messier's catalogue…

How Many Planets Are In The Universe?

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." -Ray Bradbury It wasn't all that long ago -- back when I was a boy -- that the only planets we knew of were the ones in our own Solar System. The rocky planets, our four gas giants, and the moons, asteroids, comets, and kuiper belt objects (which was only Pluto and Charon at the time) were all that we knew of. Image credit: NASA's Solar System Exploration, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/index.cfm. But these were just the worlds…

...But What If There Was More Time?

"Well you run and you run to catch up with the Sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again. The Sun is the same in a relative way but you're older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death." -Pink Floyd For the last four-and-a-half billion years, the Earth has spun on its axis, orbiting its parent star: our Sun. Today, our home planet looks something like this. Image credit: Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC. Looking at our world, even from outer space, you see some very familiar features that we think of as essential parts of our…

How to make the Slowest Slow-Motion Video Ever!

"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help." -May Sarton It's unbelievable how much more amazing the world becomes in slow-motion. You've probably seen some high speed cameras that shoot at astounding frame rates, such as the video (below) of a popping water balloon, at literally ten thousand frames-per-second. Video credit: Youtube user Nathan Gray IX. Compared to normal television or film, where frame-rates are typically only 24 to 30 frames-per-second, it's no wonder that this appears spectacular to our eyes…

The Hottest Year: 2014

NOAA will announce today that 2014 was the warmest year during the instrumental record, which begins in 1880. The announcement, which addresses findings of both NOAA and NASA, will be made today at 11:00 Eastern. Below is the press release from NOAA. I talked about this and other climate matters in a radio interview at Green Divas: Michael Mann has made the following statements regarding this news: 2014 Was Earth’s Warmest Year On Record Three major climate organizations (JMA, NASA, and NOAA) have now released their official estimates for the 2014 Global Mean Surface Temperature. Both JMA…

Fisking a typical climate science denialist comment

This one is worth looking at because it was published as a letter to the editor in an actual newspaper. Or, at least, on the web site. A little background is in order. First, Dennis Slonka wrote an Op Ed in the Providence Journal telling us that "Climate Science Will Never Be Settled." In it he made a number of incorrect statements about climate science, the IPCC, and Michael Mann. Then, Mann wrote a response that corrected the record. At some point, the Providence Journal corrected a small part of Slonka's post, removing a blinding error, which demonstrates Slonka's abysmal understanding…

Yes, we are avoiding an Ice Age, but this has been obvious for years

A new paper just published in Nature has made a bit of a stir because it has been interpreted as suggesting that global warming has the benefit of avoidance of an Ice Age that was just about to happen. However, the paper does not actually say that, and we already knew that we may have avoided the next ice age, possibly by human activities dating back to the 19th century or before. Also, the paper actually addresses a different question, an important one, but one that may be a bit esoteric for may interested parties. First, the esoteric question. Simply put, over the last two million years…

What's the Most Fundamental Thing in the Universe?

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei Geez, Ethan, why don't you take on a bigger question? This question of "fundamental things" has a special meaning to scientists and natural philosophers, going all the way back to Thales of Miletus, 2600 years ago, who began asking about the arche (αρχή), which is the "element" or "prime cause" of existing things. Of course, the scientific enterprise was just beginning, so you can't fault Thales too much for coming up with "water". But…

Weekend Diversion: Fitness Challenge!

Darn it! I'm sick and tired of being a scarecrow! Charles Atlas says he can give me a real body. All right! I'll gamble a stamp and get his free book! -Countless Magazine and Comic Book Ads Last weekend, Abbie over at ERV proclaimed herself the fittest person on Scienceblogs, and one of my readers thought I might have something to say about that. I sure do; I'm going to tell you what -- as a complete and total amateur -- fitness means to me. Fitness, for me, is about meeting your goals for your body and your life. What does that mean for you? Do you want to be able to run a marathon (or a…

Is it evil to sell MOND over Dark Matter?

Earlier this week, I wrote about an article that appeared in Nature, New Scientist and other places. The article -- and especially the popular writeups -- talked about a problem with dark matter and how MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) solves those problems. And I'm livid about it. Another physicist/scienceblogger thinks my anger is misplaced, and left me the following in my comments section: Ethan - this is not a creationism debate. Hong Sheng is a top dynamicist and he knows perfectly well what the issues are. The whole point of science at this level is to test models and propose…

Hunley Blast Killed Hunley Crew, Research Suggests (OR MAYBE NOT!) UPDATED

SEE END OF POST FOR IMPORTANT UPDATE A while back, I read Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War by Mark Ragan. The central theme of the book was the invention, more or less, of the submarine and the torpedo, curing the Civil War, but the South. The torpedo was a very tricky idea at the time. Most of the first ones involved dragging an object with a bomb inside it, or the bomb itself, by a rope, behind a submarine. The submarine would approach the target vessel, and submerge, going under it, and the bomb would hopefully be dragged into the target…

Return of the Son of the Bride of Haeckel

The Discovery Institute is so relieved — they finally found a textbook that includes a reworked version of Haeckel's figure. Casey Luskin is very excited. I'm a little disappointed, though: apparently, nobody at the Discovery Institute reads Pharyngula. I posted a quick summary in September of 2003 that went through several textbooks, and showed a couple of examples where redrawn versions of Haeckel's diagram were used. More recently, I posted a fairly exhaustive survey by Patrick Frank of the use of that diagram since 1923, which showed that it was rare, and that the concept of…

What Does The Bible, and History, Tell Us About Marriage?

It seems like everybody in the Old Testament is either married, about to get married, or was recently married but something went terribly wrong. This may be becasue the bible is about marriage. The Old Testament is a history, it is a set of laws, and it is an enthnography, and the themes themes that hold the whole thing together are warfare, resorces, marriage, and a heavy dose of odd cultish rule-making about food and blood. Marriage is a central theme of cultural life, so of course it plays an important role in a culture's own history and ethnography. But is the bible, as one example of…

Controlling the Message in the Upcoming Campaigns

By "Controlling the Message" I mean setting the agenda, usually by putting something out there that causes other people to shift their own message to be more like yours. I can think of a few spectacular yet small scale examples that are safe to talk about. I'll give you one, although if certain people hear this they may not be happy. When I first joined the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota, there was a meeting where everybody introduced themselves so new people could get a bead on the old, and the old people could test the new waters. Based entirely on where I was…

What Apple, Microsoft and the Rest of Them Don’t Get

Apple, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Google, all of them ... the companies that make the hardware and software we use ... are, it would seem, ignorant, probably willfully so, of an important thing. We use their hardware and software in our work. Many individuals are like miniature institutions or corporations. Our HR department, our payroll department, our accounting department, our R&D department, our car pool, and everything consists of a handful of machines (a car, a desktop, a mobile device, a printer) and a single person to staff them all (you, me, whatever). We do quite a bit to…

There are no marching morons

I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he's arguing that it's worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me. The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is "The Marching Morons," by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth. The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In "The Marching Morons" he carries that idea to its…

The Statistics of the Highly Improbable

This is the alst week of the academic term here, so I've been crazy busy, which is my excuse for letting things slip. I did want to get back to something raised in the comments to the comments to the Born rule post. It's kind of gotten buried in a bunch of other stuff, so I'll promote it to a full post rather than a comment. The key exchange starts with Matt Leifer at #6: The argument is about why we should use the usual methods of statistics in a many-worlds scenario, e.g. counting relative frequencies to estimate what probabilities we should assign in the future. It is not simply about…