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Mailbag, pictures and networking

If you have any questions about volcanoes, pictures of erupting (or not) volcanoes you'd like to share with me for Eruptions or have any general comments, please email me at . I'd love to hear from you and maybe your question can make it into my next mailbag post (which should hopefully be coming soon.) While you're at it, feel free to digg, slashdot, technorati or reddit anything you find interesting on Eruptions. You can also follow me on Facebook by clicking the link at the bottom left-hand side of this page (but sorry folks, no Twitter for Eruptions). Broken Top, near Three Sisters, in…

The mysteries of Antarctic volcanism

We really don't know much about the current and ancient volcanism on Antarctica, but researchers from British Antarctic Survey claim they have found evidence of subglacial eruptions in western Antarctica, mostly in the form of ash and volcanic debris intercalated with the ice. It would not be surprising if there was active volcanism underneath the ice sheets of the continent. However, they then take it one (or multiple) step(s) further by saying that this subglacial volcanism might explain the warming seen on the western side of the continent. Now, that would be very surprising as the…

Chaiten increases its rumbling ... again!

I'll be brief (as I'm in the middle of moving), but I did see a report that activity at Chaiten is increasing yet again. This seems like the operating mode for this volcano, with a waxing and waning of intensity, since the volcano started erupting on May 2. The latest report indicates renewed ash emissions producing an ash column that reaches ~20,000 feet (4,000 meters), with ash falling on nearby areas. There is also mention of some increased seismic activity at the Chilean caldera. The picture above shows the extent of the mobilized ash and volcanic debris that has wiped out much of the…

Chaiten ash still causing problems

It has been a while since we've seen a Chaiten update, but today there is a report that LanChile has had to cancel flights to Puerto Montt due to ash from the volcano. Chaiten has been erupting since early May, so now we're almost 2 1/2 months into the eruption - quite a feat for such a large eruption! The report also mentions that some residents of the town of Chaiten have been able to visit their homes to collect belonging and the government might just try to rebuild the town in an entirely new location. The USGS plans to send geologists to the volcano later in 2008 or early 2009 to survey…

Chaiten eruption photos

There are some astounding new pictures of Chaiten in full eruption over at the Smithsonian Website. There pictures were released by the USGS/VDAP team and show a full eruption column coming from the new dome in the Chaiten caldera (see above and below). The dome itself looks giant, filling up a lot of the old caldera (the highlands around the edge of the dome itself). The eruption is almost the antithesis of the 2004-08 Mt. Saint Helens dome eruptions which has produced a minute dome filling the 1980 crater. This rhyolite dome is the first major rhyolite eruption in almost 100 years, so I…

New Lousiana law defends pagans

Panel moves âReligious Freedom Actâ: A Senate panel narrowly approved legislation Tuesday whose supporters say reaffirms constitutional guarantees of freedom of religious expression. Approval came over the objections of those who contend Senate Bill 606 is unnecessary because the U.S. Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution already protect religious freedom.⦠The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Metairie, also had support from Baptist and Catholic church representatives as well as the head of a group that promotes a pagan church. Valli Henry, president of the…

The genetics of your kids; know thyself

Genetic Future says basically what I was going to say about report about genetic testing for abilities in China. Dan MacArthur notes: Unlike a lot of commentators on this story, I've got nothing fundamentally against the idea of using genetics to make predictions about a child's future, and on guiding the activities a child engages in based on those predictions. Here's the thing, though: this only makes sense if the predictions are both accurate and relevant, and right now the predictions from genetics regarding complex traits are neither. Parents should save their money for more useful ways…

Eunuch for love

Family axes wedding plans, Egyptian cuts off organ: A 25-year-old Egyptian man cut off his own penis to spite his family after he was refused permission to marry a girl from a lower class family, police reported Sunday. This kind of reminds me of self-castration for religious reasons. It is a reality that in many parts of the world children are property a very tangible way. Their marriages are arranged for the benefit of the lineage, as determined by the pater familias. Honor killings in fact show a face of this reality which comports with the most grisly functions of the classical Roman…

Brown is the color of government money

Who's manning the TARP desk?: Less than half a dozen people are responsible for making the final decisions about which banks get part of the $700 billion in bailout money available through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to Department of Treasury officials. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the Sunlight Foundation in January for the members of the TARP Investment Committee, a FOIA officer recently responded with just four names, including Assistant Secretary, Neel Kashkari; Chief Investment Officer, James Lambright; Acting Assistant Secretary for…

Not-So-Glib Fortuna, Take 2

Or three, perhaps, since I already wrote one lengthy reply in the comments of the first post. How he's back with a second comment, which is little improved from the first one. Yes, Ed, I understand that your blog enjoys more traffic, but if you'd like to challenge me in the future, at least notify me with a link in my comments section. Otherwise, all you're doing is whispering behind someone's back in a room full of your friends and pretending you've somehow won the debate. The trackback gets sent, and Jay obviously reads this page when it happens. You somehow managed to find your way back…

Thanks for the measles yet again, Andy

There are many harms attributable to the antivaccine movement and its promotion of antivaccine beliefs. Certainly, the harm those of us who have been combatting antivaccine misinformation fear is the return of vaccine-preventable diseases, which is something we've seen in the form of outbreaks, such as the Disneyland measles outbreak two years ago and, in my own state, pertussis outbreaks. The Disneyland outbreak was a wake-up call to California legislators, who in its wake passed SB 277, a law that eliminated personal belief exemptions (PBEs) to school vaccine requirements. Now, only medical…

Some perspective on "predatory" open access journals

Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system. I'm hoping my methodology here will be helpful. I hope to counter the predatory open access (OA)…

Some Thoughts On Use Of Animals In Research And Teaching

In light of the recent cases of researchers quitting animal research under the duress of threats and attacks by Animal Rights groups, e.g., Dr. Ringach at UCLA, this may be a good time to repost this old rant from May 23, 2005 (originally here, then reposted here on January 16, 2006): The story about the class dissection of a dog stirred quite a lot of controversy, including heated exchanges in the comments of these two posts on Pharyngula. I joined in late to that discussion, not because I missed it, but because I did not know what to say before I knew more about the case, and also because…

The Creation “Museum”

We visited the Creation "Museum" last Friday. I'm careful to put the title in quotes, because it is not a museum in any respectable sense of the word. I knew this ahead of time; I had no expectation of any kind of credible presentation in this place, but what impressed me most is how far it failed to meet even my low hopes. They clearly want to ape a real museum, but they can't — their mission is the antithesis of open inquiry. The guards are a clear example. Real museums have guards, of course: they're there to protect valuable exhibits from theft and vandalism. But real museums want their…

ID Defenders Play Pretend

One of the incredible things I've noticed about the raft of pro-ID articles and columns written not by the major ID advocates but by others in the media who support ID, is the degree to which they completely ignore the substance of Judge Jones' ruling. In his ruling, Judge Jones went into excruciating detail in discussing the voluminous evidence presented at trial that established that ID is not a genuine scientific theory but rather a religious idea being dressed up in scientific-sounding language in order to avoid past court rulings. ID's defenders just seem to pretend that none of that…

Deciphering Celestial Signals in a New Way

By Dr. Gerry Harp, Senior Astrophysicist, Center for SETI Research, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs Trained as a quantum mechanic, Dr. Gerry Harp was deeply interested in possibilities for using the multiple telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array to generate steerable "beams" on the sky -- beams that could be far smaller than any single antenna could produce. Such beams don't emit anything, but work in reverse by capturing only energy that comes from the sky in a certain direction. Gerry joined the SETI Institute in 2000, practically at the telescope's inception and uses the telescope for…

Your tax dollars at work: a look at clinical trials supported by NCCAM.

In my last post, I started wading into the question of what kinds of ethical questions arise from clinical trials on "alternative" medical treatments, especially clinical trials supported by the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The ethical questions include whether alternative treatments expose human subjects to direct harm, or to indirect harm (by precluding a more effective treatment), not to mention whether the money spent to research alternative modalities would be better spent on other lines of research. I think it's worthwhile to dip into the NCCAM…

The director of NCCAM discovers Bayesian probability. Hilarity ensues.

Over the years, the criticism of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it above all, a form of thinking that I like to call methodolatry. Now, when EBM works correctly, this is not an entirely unreasonable way to look at things. After all, we just want to know what works in patients. Basically, when EBM is working…

Public service announcement: No, drinking your own urine will not cure breast cancer

I consider posts like the one I'm writing now to be public service, an obligation. There are times when I don't want to do them, when they become so sadly, depressingly repetitive in overall outline (and, unfortunately, likely outcome) that it takes an effort to begin. However, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and as a result these sorts of stories seem to pop out of the woodwork this time of year, I feel I must. It doesn't matter that I just discussed another one of these cases a mere month ago. This time around, the article appears (as is so frequently the case) in The…

A Dunning-Kruger manifesto about vaccines and autism

I've frequently written about the "arrogance of ignorance," a phenomenon that anyone who's paid attention to what quacks, cranks, or antivaccine activists (but I repeat myself) write and say beyond a certain period of time will have encountered. Basically, it's the belief found in such people—and amplified in groups—that somehow they can master a subject as well or better than experts who have spent their entire professional lives studying the subject on their own, often just through the use of Google University and the echo chamber discussion forums that they frequent with their fellow…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: More than just an herbalist

Earlier this week, I deconstructed a truly inane article on Mike Adams NewsTarget website espousing dangerous cancer quackery, with claims that herbal concoctions alone could "naturally heal" cancer. Such a claim wouldn't have attracted bringing the hammer of Respectful Insolence⢠down if there had been some actual evidence presented that this healer could do what she claimed she could do. Unfortunately, as is the case with virtually all such claims, there was none, just a complicated regimen involving four or five different herbal brews involving a total of around 40 different plants and…

Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denial, and the problem of "recantation" by cranks

Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…

Limiting physician trainees' work hours and unintended consequences

I've been meaning to write about this topic for quite a while but never really found a reason to. Indeed, this one's been floating around in the back of my mind for a long time. Perhaps one reason is that it's hard for a surgeon to write about this topic without coming off sounding like an old fart, a curmudgeon, unhappy about change and thinking that a system that was good enough for me must sure as hell be good enough for the current generation of residents. In fact, even after seeing an article that normally would have spurred me to write about this topic more than two weeks ago, I stored…

Facepalm, thy name is Dr. Egnor! Or: I find your excess of faith in the scientific abilities of physicians...disturbing

I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he's been especially active over at the Discovery Institute's repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy people, more so even than a humble breast cancer surgeon like me, and few are as motivated as I am to blog. Yet, these days Dr. Egnor's been flooding EN&V with more of his blather than I've seen him do in a long time, maybe ever. It's times like these…

Quoth Dean Ornish and NCCAM: Your randomized clinical trials can't study my CAM!

Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…

Not-so-startling but nonetheless shocking revelations about the Burzynski Clinic

It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who inexplicably has been permitted to continue to administer an unproven cancer treatment to children with deadly brain cancers for nearly 37 years now. Beginning in 1977, when he left Baylor College of Medicine and opened up the Burzynski Clinic, Burzynski has administered a cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons to patients. After nearly four decades and several dozen phase II clinical trials started, he never published a completed phase II trial. The only evidence he's published consists mainly…

Destroying the FDA to save it? No, more like just destroying it.

Yesterday, I noted the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, a Hobson’s choice of a bill for those of us who support increased biomedical research funding that basically said: You can have an increase in the NIH budget. You can have the Cancer Moonshot. You can have President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative and his brain mapping initiative. You can have additional funding to combat the opioid crisis. You can have all that, but only if you also accept a grab bag of longstanding pharmaceutical industry wishes, such as new pathways to approve drugs and devices with a lower standard of…

Another week of GW News, March 27, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMarch 27, 2011 Chuckles, Fukushima Heroes, Bad News, Fukushima Reactions, Fukushima Talk WWD, WMD, Earth Hour, WikiLeaks, Young, Ruddiman Bottom Line, UNGCF, The Question, Effectiveness, Cook, BEST Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs,…

Around the Web: Aaron Swartz chronological link roundup

The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast. I've tried to gather enough so that someone working through even a small selection of the posts would get a good idea of all the dimensions of the story. I've also tried to perhaps give a bit of a library/academia slant in the selection. As usual with these compilations, readers should feel free to suggest further readings in the comments especially those that add a…

Underfunded? Or Unpopular?

This week's question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series is: What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded? The first and obvious answer is, of course, "my field", whatever it is. But then.... But then I thought about my own field of chronobiology and I think that its funding goes as overal funding goes. When there is a lot of money to go around, clock researchers get their fair share. When everyone is suffering, so does my field. After all, circadian field is deemed pretty "sexy" - it was a runner-up in the year-end popularity lists of the Science magazine at…

ClockTutorial #2a: Forty-Five Years of Pittendrigh's Empirical Generalizations

This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here. It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…

Investing in children's health: Home visit programs

I wrote last week about the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created to invest in improving overall population health – with the hope that improved health will help slow the growth of healthcare costs. Another provision of the ACA that aims to reduce future healthcare costs is “Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs” (Section 2951). Three studies published in the latest supplemental issue of the American Journal of Public Health address this type of program. Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs send…

For You Were Strangers in the Land of Egypt: Preparing for a Century of Displacement

Passover is a holiday deeply concerned with inclusion - at one point during each seder night, we open our doors and leave them open wide, and call out "let all who are hungry come and eat." One year, teaching Hebrew School to 10 year olds, I asked them what would happen if they called out and a stranger came in and sat down. My students, largely from affluent and middle families in a leafy suburb where most strangers are likely to be much like them, were to a one deeply uncomfortable with the notion. They expressed fear at the thought of the stranger coming to their table, even surrounded…

Views of a CalOSHA Inspector

As we learned this week, Cal/OSHA and the OSH Appeals Board are in a state of disarray.  A daring group of state employees have raised their voices in protest (see "CalOSHA inspectors demand change") reminding us that dysfunction in their agency can translate into more injuries and illnesses for California's workers.  The collective action of these inspectors and staff is vital.  So too is the sole voice of individuals who share their experience and insight.  Meet Jack Oudiz, who joined Cal/OSHA in 1985.  Mr. Oudiz is retiring from Cal/OSHA and shares the following: My…

FDA and NIH Disappoint on Sweetener Safety

By Myra L. Karstadt, Ph.D   Did you enjoy your acesulfame today?  How much did you eat?  Do you know whether acesulfame is safe to eat?  Those are not trick questions.  Acesulfame is currently one of the best-selling artificial sweeteners in America, but itâs likely that very few people even know that acesulfame is in many of their foods and beverages.  The FDA has approved acesulfame as a food additive, but it based its decision on flawed studies. Stealth Sweetener Thereâs a good reason why acesulfame has such a low profile: itâs usually a back-up player, used in sweetener blends with…

What happens when you study conspiracy theories? The conspiracy theorists make up conspiracy theories about you!

I've known about this effect for a while as I've been variously accused of being in the pocket of big pharma, big ag, big science, democrats and republicans etc. Now Stephan Lewandowsky, in follow up to his "NASA Faked the Moon Landings – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax." paper, has used these conspiratorial responses to study how conspiracy theorists respond to being studied! It's called "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation". Here's the abstract: Conspiracist ideation has been repeatedly implicated in the…

How to rot down dead bodies: the Tet Zoo body farm

Like some most virtually all hopefully all people interested in animals, I have a dark, guilty secret: I covet and collect dead bodies. In fact I'm of the opinion that if you're interested in animals and are not interested in dead bodies, there's something wrong with you. How can you not be interested in - nay, fascinated by - anatomy, variation and functional morphology, and how are you going to learn about this if not by looking at, and manipulating, dead bodies and their constituent parts? Few of us have ready access to museum collections, and building up a collection of specimens…

ClockTutorial #2a: Forty-Five Years of Pittendrigh's Empirical Generalizations

This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here. It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…

ClockTutorial #2a: Forty-Five Years of Pittendrigh's Empirical Generalizations

This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here. It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…

ClockTutorial #2a: Forty-Five Years of Pittendrigh's Empirical Generalizations

This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here. It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…

Earthquake Time Bombs by Robert Yeats

The Great San Francisco Earthquake(s) On October 8th, 1865, the "Great San Francisco Earthquake" hit south of the city of San Francisco, magnitude 6.3. On October 21st, 1868, the 'Great San Francisco Earthquake" hit near Haywards, east of the city, across the bay, magnitude 6.8. On April 18th, 1906, the "Great San Francisco Earthquake" hit the Bay Area, magnitude 7.6. The death tolls were unknown (but small), 30, and about 3,000, respectively. Eighteen significant earthquakes happened after that (and five or so had happened between the first "great quakes") before February 9th, 1971, when…

Evolution of direct development in echinoderms

In chapter 14 of the Origin of Species, Darwin wondered about the whole process of metamorphosis. Some species undergo radical transformations from embryo to adult, passing through larval stages that are very different from the adult, while others proceed directly to the adult form. This process of metamorphosis is of great interest to both developmental and evolutionary biologists, because what we see are major transitions in form not over long periods of time, but within a single generation. We are so much accustomed to see a difference in structure between the embryo and the adult, that we…

How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?

Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes. Fixed up and reposted. Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or…

Why Minnesota Can't Have Nice Things

In Minnesota’s Lakes Country, what we sometimes call “Up North,” the people have various degrees of knowledge of the land and its wildlife. Cabin people and campers visit briefly and may learn in detail the workings of a particular lake or patch of forest, but are usually poorly informed of the true nature of the landscape. People with “lake homes” (seasonally used cabins on steroids owned by people who live elsewhere) may spend more time in Lakes Country but actually know less about it than campers might because having central heating and air conditioning, a paved driveway, and big-ass SUV…

Evolutionary Psychology: Careful, some practitioners may be carrying a kitchen knife!

Darwinian Psychology, or really, any “Psychology” that claims to be science, will operate under the assumption that the human brain, as an organ, has arrived at its modern form through the process of evolution, which includes a certain amount of design through Natural Selection. It does not take that much additional sophistication to realize that the human brain is not only good at, but absolutely requires for typical functioning, a great deal of learning. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the typical human brain functions as it does because of information provided by the genes that…

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2010-2011

In which we look back on the ninth full year of this blog, and one of the most unpleasant incidents in the whole run, which nearly ruined what was otherwise a good year. ------------ This is probably going to be the longest of these posts, at least in terms of the number of links included-- I've got all of the worthwhile-looking posts open in tabs, and it comes to 82 total. I may ditch a few of them during the post-writing process, but we'll see how that goes. Anyway, this blog year kicked off with probably the least enjoyable incident of the entire run, namely Sodamageddon. The higher-ups at…

NBA Yearly Predictions

I know I'm a few days late on this, but I thought I'd follow up last year's embarrassing predictions with another slate. Actually, it wasn't all bad. I predicted that the Pistons would be better than the year before and they were. I predicted that the Miami Heat would start slow, leading Pat Riley to force Stan Van Gundy to step down so he could take over as coach, and he did. And I predicted that the Larry Brown situation with the Knicks would be disasterous, and it was. But I whiffed completely on the Heat winning it all. I really thought the off-season moves they made, bringing in selfish…

Culture Overrides Biology (Another falsehood)

At issue here is the idea that "biology" is slow and ponderous, glacial, even geological, in its rate of change, while culture is quick and snappy and makes rapid adjustment. Connected to this is a subtly different but very important idea: Culture actually makes sensible adjustments to compensate for changes in the biological realm. Surely, it is true that culture can change more quickly than biology, and surely it is true that culture can make adjustments for biological effects or alterations. Indeed, the very essence of humanity is culture's effects on human capacities. We tropical ex-…

The Impeachment of Webster Cook (Crackergate)

Webster Cook is the young man attending a Florida University who was assaulted by Catholic Host Watchers because he did not chew the sacred cracker fast enough in church several weeks ago. This led to the incident that became internationally known as Crackergate. The internet itself became the venue for a major kerfuffle involving PZ Myers and The Catholic Church, but in the mean time, back in Florida, Webster Cook was charged, as a student in the University's own Kangaroo court, with various crimes, but acquitted a few weeks ago. More recently, he (as a member of student government) was…

An Interview with Randy Olson, Maker of Sizzle

Sizzle Randy Olson is a Harvard ('84) trained marine biologist with field experience on the Great Barrier Reef, in the Antarctic, the US Virgin Islands, and elsewhere. He even spent a little time with Jacques Cousteau. But an extensive career in marine biology was not to be. Randy started to change careers around 1990, with the production of a number of short films including "Barnacles Tell No LIes" (which I've placed at the bottom of this post for your enjoyment). In 1994 he literally jumped ship. walking away from a tenured professorship in New Hampshire, and went to USC to study…