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On false equivalences

Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought: You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point. Of course they want people like Dawkins to keep…

On Pat Buchanan's Holocaust denial

Martin Cothran, presumably upset that I keep pointing out that the supposed logic teacher prefers logical fallacies to honest data, has now sunken to defending Holocaust denial. In replying to his repetition of a screed by Pat Buchanan, I noted that not only was Barack Obama rightly dismissive of that sort of armchair quarterbacking ("Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela."), but that it was a bit odd to quote a known…

A reflected light from the nations

I was putting off commenting on this, and wondering whether I had any value to add. But a reader pointed me to Noah Feldman's Orthodox paradox, a piece in The New York Times Magazine where the author, a young Harvard law professor, reflects on his journey from the Modern Orthodox subculture into the wider world. The whole piece is worth reading. There is a problem in these sorts of articles insofar as Feldman is such an "insider," while most of the readers are such "outsiders," that one is totally dependent on the author for context and situation. For example, most gentiles have…

Dr. Andrew Weil versus evidence-based medicine

Let's face it, Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) movement. He is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the CAM/IM movement, back before it ever managed to achieve a modicum of unearned respectability, to popularize CAM. In fact, no physician that I can think of has over the course of his lifetime done more to promote the rise of quackademic medicine than Dr. Weil. The only forces greater than Dr. Weil…

The Central Dogma of Alternative Medicine

[Note: My flight home from London was delayed until quite late; so unfortunately another "rerun" is in order. This one's from three years ago, and I actually consider it one of my "classics." It was also originally published at my not-so-super-secret other blog and represents the first time I tried to put together my concept of a "central dogma" of alternative medicine into a semi-coherent form. Ultimately, this lead to my talk The Central Dogma of Alternative Medicine, given at Skepticon last year. If you've been reading less than three years, it's new to you. If you haven't, you really…

Uncertainty versus certainty in the mammography wars

As I write this, I am winging my way home from the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR, Twitter hashtag #AACR14) in San Diego. (OK, I'm revising this to fit the format and, of course, the Insolence of this particular blog. Shockingly, I didn't have as much time to blog in San Diego as I had thought I would. Go figure.) Basically, the AACR meeting is one of the largest meetings of basic and translational cancer researchers in the world. I try to go every year, and pretty much have succeeded since around 1998 or 1999. As an "old-timer" who's attended at least a…

What Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski doesn't want you to know about antineoplastons

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been spending a lot of time (and, characteristically, verbiage) analyzing the phenomenon known as Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, his "cancer cure" known as antineoplastons, and his incompetent version of "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy." In this third and final part, I want to come back to antineoplastons, because it has been pointed out to me that there is an aspect of this story that has received little attention. One of my readers in particular has helped enormously. I wish I could credit this person by name to express my gratitude, but, for reasons…

Giardia: Suck on It, ID Creationists!

One of the major fallacies of intelligent design creationism is that so many structures appear to be haphazardly designed. Case in point: polyadenylation in Giardia lamblia. ScienceBlogling Carl Zimmer, in an excellent post about the recently published Giardia genome, describes the system: There's all sorts of fascinating stuff lurking in Giardia's genome. As they surveyed its 6470 genes, the genome team was struck by how simple Giardia is, compared to other eukaryotes. I think this diagram in particular does a nice job of illustrating Giardia's simplicity. The top drawing shows what…

TB Prevention Is Not a Government Conspiracy

In most cases, assuming that the Bush Administration is up to no good and plans to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing is a good first principle (unless you have a "kick me" sign staple gunned to your ass). The CDC alerting passengers that they were seated near a symptomatic TB patient is not the slippery slope of tyranny, but a responsible public health response. At firedoglake, there is an idiotic post about the CDC's response to a person infected with TB on an airplane: TB on planes: another excuse to restrict our civil liberties? You heard it here first.... This is great…

IG to Probe Censorship of Government Scientists

This is one reason why having a Democratic congress matters. The Inspectors General of NASA and the Commerce Department have begun to investigate whether scientific findings were muzzled or altered by the Bush administration (italics mine): Prompted by a request this fall by 14 Democratic senators, the IGs are examining whether political appointees have prevented climate researchers at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from conveying their findings to the public. The issue of global warming has emerged as one of the most contentious scientific debates within the…

Antibiotic Resistance and National Healthcare

Revere has a very good historical roundup of the 'uninevitability' of a national or universal healthcare system. One consequence of our fragmented, patchwork healthcare system is antibiotic resistant bacteria. Just to give you an example of how bad the antibiotic resistance problem is, in most hospitals, anywhere from 20-70% of Staphylococcus aureus infections are methicillin resistant ("MRSA"). In long-term care facilities, around 90% of S. aureus infections are MRSA. MRSA infections are quite serious. Not only are they harder to treat (due to treatment failure from using the wrong…

Extraordinary Rendition and the Silence of a Few Good Men

No, this post isn't about William Shatner albums. Over at Orcinus, there's a great post about the rendition (rendering? My torture lexicon is rusty...) of terrorist suspects to other countries. Here's the description of the U.S. citizens who live near the airbases and facilities used to conduct these operations: But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there's another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who…

KPC: An Emerging Threat

No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now. Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae*, but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool microbiologists use (I'll refer to the carbapenemase gene as the 'KPC gene'). KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high. The KPC gene confers resistance to all cephalosporins and Ã-lactam antibiotics: basically,…

STEC Surveillance: UR DOING IT WRONG?

There's some good news and bad news regarding E. coli surveillance in meat products. The good news: The pathogenic Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia Coli (pSTEC) serotypes known collectively as the "Big Six" will soon be banned from U.S. meat, a top expert told a meat industry conference Thursday. Action to declare the six non-O157:H7 serotypes as adulterants in meat could come as early as next week, according to Mohammad Koohmaraie, chief executive officer for the meat division of IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group based in Lake Forest Park, WA. For certain, he says, the Big Six --…

We Are Experiencing the Lowest Male Employment in Recorded U.S. History...

...but these are green shoots merely "bumps in the road." Or something. Brad DeLong posted a graph showing just how dismal the employment numbers are: as a percentage of population, employment has cratered. That's a much more revealing number as unemployment, especially the strict version ('U3') leaves out all sorts of people who would be willing to work if there were jobs. Inspired by Delong, I decided to look at the historical male employment. I'm not a believer in the (false) notion of a 'mancession', but attitudes towards working women have changed dramatically over the last sixty…

MA State Commissioner of Education Confuses Evaluation with Personnel Management

Given the fundamental problems that New York City's 'proficiency growth' evaluations of teachers have, it's absolutely unclear why Massachusetts, which leads the nation according to the gold-standard NAEP, would want to adopt them (we'll return to this point later). Yet the contagion of stupidity that is educational 'reform' knows no bounds: The proposed regulations would reward teachers and administrators whose students show more than a year's worth of growth in proficiency under the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System and on other exams, while educators whose students…

Paedocypris

I saw on Muton, and several readers have mentioned it to me, this article about the world's smallest vertebrate, fish of the genus Paedocypris. It's a gorgeous translucent cyprinid, so is somewhat related to my favorite fish, Danio rerio. They live in cool, slow moving water in peat swamp forests of Southeast Asia. One female, only 7.9mm long, contained about 50 eggs, so they know it was sexually mature. Living Paedocypris progenetica, CMK 18496, (a, b) male, ca 9 mm; (c) female, ca 8.8 mm. That size isn't at all shocking—my zebrafish larvae at about that size are active hunters with…

Science is rational; scientists are not

Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why? Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the…

Evolution, a reason for the African HIV epidemic?

Please read: Follow up post. Genetic Variation Increases HIV Risk In Africans: A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, according to new research. Conversely, the same variation also appears to prolong survival of those infected with HIV by approximately two years. ... HIV affects 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa today, an HIV burden greater than any other region of the world. Around 90 per cent of people in Africa carry the genetic variation, meaning…

How fast is evolution - check reality!

Regular readers of this weblog know that there are some quick "back of the envelope" prediction equations that one can appeal to to get a rough sense of how quickly evolution can proceed. For example, the time until fixation of a neutral (no selection + or -) mutant is 4Ne generations, where Ne is the effective breeding population. On a quantitative polygenic trait the response to selection, R is proportional to h2, the heritability, multiplied by the selection coefficient, S (R = h2*S being the classic empirical breeder's equation). Nevertheless, sometimes it is important to get an…

Statement from a producer of the quadruped family film....

I am going to cut & paste whole a comment from Jemima Harrison of Passionate Productions, who is behind the upcoming documentary about the family who exhibits quadruped locomotion: The mutation on 17p has been identified by a Turkish/German team in Berlin headed by Professor Stefan Mundlos. They suggest, some would say controversially, that this mutation could have knocked out a gene that plays a role in bipedal walking, atavastically exposing an earlier form of walking. Professor Humphrey believes, however, that this mutation has merely caused the cerebellar hypoplasia confirmed by MRI…

Evolution's Empire

David Sloan Wilson, the doyen of Multilevel Selection theorists, has a new book out, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. It seems pretty clear to me that Wilson is trying to "do a Dennett" here. But unlike Dennett, who was not a scientist himself and so operated within standard evolutionary science by regurgitating Richard Dawkins' work (who was himself simply a channel for W.D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith), Wilson is known to be something of a heterodox figure because of his emphasis upon higher levels of selection than the…

This is faith!

Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock: . To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. "We don't subscribe to this idea of the 'God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. "Instead, we think: 'Here's what the Bible says. Now let's go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.' " The whole story is a sad tale of a few credentialed geologists making their stand with their perception of a literal Bible against the consensus of their field. In Evolution…

Religious nominalism & cognitive opacity

I am a proponent of nominalism when it comes to religion. Or, to put it another way, instead of a religion being a Platonic category with precise and specific boundaries, I think a more accurate model is a distribution of ideas and sentiments in the minds of human beings which is always in flux. The many layers of cognitive operation, from reflective verbal commitment and elaboration, all the way down to reflexive and automatic conceptualization below the conscious surface, means that the shape of distribution the itself may change as a function of the level at which one is examining the…

Blood of the British

Two articles are out, one by Stephen Oppenheimer, author of The Real Eve, and another profiling some of Bryan Sykes'1 new research. The headlines are eye-catching, "We're nearly all Celts under the skin!" The fine print: Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one. The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at 73 per cent. Wales is the most Celtic part of mainland Britain, with 83 per cent. Sykes and Oppenheimer tell the tale of the resettlement of northern Europe, and…

Palin: She's Not Only a Young Earth Creationist, She's a...

...John Bircher? By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Brayton, I came across this Salon article describing Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's claim that she is a young earth creationist (or, at the very least, believes that human and dinosaurs lived at the same time, which is fucking stupid enough). But it gets even more insane. From Dave Neiwert, we learn that she very well might be a John Bircher: What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995…

Dennis Lehane on Living in Boston

By way of Tim Smith, we come across this description of living in Boston by novelist Dennis Lehane: ...More than one friend had suggested we move to the suburbs -- homes were cheaper, schools were safer, property taxes and car insurance premiums were lower. [We] grew up together in the city, though. We took to picket fences and split-level ranches like we took to shag carpeting and Ultimate Fighting. Which is to say, not so much. ... I prefer subways -- you pop down the hole on one side of the city, pop back up on the other side, and you never have to hit your horn, not once. I don't like…

Van Jones Is Right: They Are A--holes

(from driftglass) You might have heard about the latest successful rightwing hissy-fit: environmentalist and White House advisor Van Jones is being attacked by conservatives for calling Republicans "assholes." But he's saying what many Democrats are thinking. I don't mean that any individual Republican is an asshole (or that there aren't Democrats who are assholes). I'll willing stipulate that they are no less kind to small animals and children. But as a party and as a political movement and organization, they are assholes. Consider: Invading a country which had nothing to do with the…

Reducing Quinolone Antibiotic Use Lowers Resistance

You might find it hard to believe, but determining whether restricting antibiotic use leads to decreased resistance is actually not very straightforward. That's because antibiotic resistance genes can be linked to--that is, they travel along with--other resistance genes or even genes that are favored for some other reason. So even when an antibiotic is no longer used, the use of other antibiotics (or other antibacterials such as quarternary ammonium compounds or colloidal silver) can keep these genes around. But quinolone antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin ("Cipro"), which are used to treat…

How Creationism (and Other Idiocies) Are Mainstreamed

One of the things that has enabled the mainstreaming of various idiocies, from altie woo, to creationism, to global warming denialism is mainstream corporate media's inability to accurately describe lunacy. For obvious reasons, 'family-friendly' newspapers and teevee can't call creationists, birthers, or deathers batshit lunatic or fucking morons. This is where 'civility' (beyond the basic norms of decency when dealing with the mentally ill) and pretensions of 'balance' utterly fail. In Idiot America, Charles Pierce provides a good example of how this works: How does it work? This is how it…

So Now We'll Be in Afghanistan for, Like, 20 Friedman Units

Or something. Look at what we found in Afghanistan: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one…

Teachers Are "Shovel Ready"

One of the things that bothered me about the 'stimulus' bill (other than it not being called an employment bill) is that there was a focus on things being 'shovel ready.' Not only did this imply that the depression* would be short-term (whereas un-, underemployment, and flat wages are largely ongoing structural problems), but 'shovel ready' also implied that keeping state and local budgets stable--not laying people off and cancelling orders with private contractors--was out of bounds (thanks Senator Nelson!). Atrios sums it up well: I'm personally a bit tired of hearing about all of the…

A Few Observations About the NY Times Tea Bugger Poll

I'll have more to say about the rally tomorrow (short version: as was said in more civilized times, meh.). But I think it's worth noting that the Tea Partyers are even more wingnutty than Digby thinks: 1) The NY Times poll graphic compares Tea Buggers with all respondents. But keep in mind that the real Americans Tea Buggers are 18 percent of the total sample. So.... 2) Race, not in the form of lynching, but in the belief that blacks are social parasites is a huge difference. When asked, "In recent years, has too much been made of the problems facing black people?", 52% of Tea Buggers…

Fear Mongering with Bad Statistics: NY Times and the Cato Institute Confuse Current and Future Obligations

Friday, The NY Times reported on Greece's ongoing financial troubles. There is something to be said for discussing whether pensions should begin at age 50--it touches on economics, social values, and so on. But then the reporter refers to some 'analysis' by the Cato Institute: According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece's pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government's debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of a nation's economic output…

AIG Versus Arrowsmith

Matt Taibbi says everything I've been thinking regarding Wall Street compensation (but better): Here's the real problem with people like Jake DeSantis. Throughout this whole period, they never were able to connect the dots -- to grasp the fact that when they skimmed a million here or a million there off the great rivers of capital that flowed through their offices, that that money came from somewhere, from someone. To them, it wasn't someone else's money, it was just money, and why shouldn't they have it? ...For a guy like this, his worth as a human being is wrapped up in buying a bag of…

A Post-Hamas Gaza: It Can Get Worse

A few days ago, I noted that, if history is any guide, a post-Hamas Gaza could wind up under the sway of even more radical factions. Sadly, I'm not the only one who thinks this (italics mine): Bringing Hamas to power is one of the most horrific legacies of the Bush administration. In retrospect, the decision to oust Arafat (who had demonstrated the ability to thwart terrorism, and had reduced it to almost zero between 1997 and 2000) was a blunder. The administration's subsequent stingy support for Mahmoud Abbas was incomprehensible and its decision to force the Palestinian elections that…

NY Times Reveals Shocking Fact About Deficits and GDP Growth: Implications for the 'Solvency' of Social Security

Like many in the Coalition of the Sane, I'm shocked by The NY Times' willingness to run an article on the front page that states this: If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades -- no easy feat, to be fair -- the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale. Not that I'm concerned about the deficit in a deflationary economy, but worrying about deficits seem to be an idée fixe among our political…

Why Friends Don't Let Friends Read The Washington Post: The For-Profit School Edition

Certainly, you shouldn't when the topic is education 'reform.' Some snarky bloggers refer to The Washington Post as the Kaplan Test Prep Company, since most of the Post's profits come from the KTPC, not the newspaper (both of which are owned by the Washington Post Company). Well, any claims The Washington Post might want to make about ethics or morality (not to mention for-profit education) should be utterly ignored: Though Kaplan is not the largest in the industry, the Post Company chairman, Donald Graham, has emerged as the highest-profile defender of for-profit education. Together,…

The Future of Science Funding Is a Microcosm of What Happened in This Election

I realize most people probably don't care very much about science funding, but I'll go out on a limb and assume that many readers here do care about science funding (I think many, in the public as a whole, don't even realize how science is paid for). The Republican platform, Pledge to America, boldly declares that all non-military discretionary spending will be reduced to 2008 levels. Here's what this would mean for science funding: Under that plan, research and development at nonmilitary agencies -- including those that sponsor science and health research -- would fall 12.3 percent, to $57…

Mystery Bird: Spotted Towhee, Pipilo maculatus

tags: Spotted Towhee, Pipilo maculatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Spotted Towhee, Pipilo maculatus, photographed at Samish Flats, Skagit County, Washington State. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Marv Breece, 22 January 2008 [larger view]. Canon EOS 350D 1/1000s f/5.0 at 165.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: This bird's slight mistrust of humans bearing lenses provides an excellent opportunity to practice our "bottoms first"…

Mystery Bird: Field Sparrow, Spizella pusilla

tags: Field Sparrow, Spizella pusilla, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Field Sparrow, Spizella pusilla, photographed at Newton Hills State Park in South Dakota. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Terry Sohl, 30 September 2008 [larger view]. Photo taken with Canon 40D, 400 5.6L. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: The identification of sparrows got a lot easier in 1990, when Kenn Kaufman's Advanced Birding codified what he calls "the generic…

Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…

More Free Books for my Readers

Everyone loves free books, right? Well, I know I do, and since I've got a huge stack of books in my apartment that are seeking a loving home, I want to share them with you. These books are duplicates of review copies, advance reading copies and uncorrected proofs as well as some books that I purchased. All books are in excellent (like new) shape, unless otherwise noted. I am offering them to you several times per week for the next few months, free of charge, although I will ask you to pay the cost of the shipping envelope and postage for mailing each book to you. Below the jump is a list of…

Brown Bird Blue: The Photographer's Follow-up

tags: Blue House Sparrow, Passer domesticus, birds, blue feather color, plumage color, refraction Blue-colored Male House Sparrow, Passer domesticus, photographed in Sydney, Australia, April 2009. Image: Richard Shears, Daily Mail [larger view]. Some of you might remember the remarkable photographs of the blue-colored male house sparrow, Passer domesticus, that was photographed in a garden in Sydney, Australia a couple weeks ago. I posted the images I had, along with my speculations, but was unable to go further than that. However, I tracked down the photographer and he has very kindly…

Update: Antarctic Vote Count

The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 3848 - 1710 - 1424 - 1157 - 1113 out of 496 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With only 6 weeks remaining, voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. The top four vote-getters are receiving most of these votes, so I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now! If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and…

Debut of the new Flu Wiki Forum

After many travails and gnashing of keyboards, The Flu Wiki Forum has a gorgeous new look. We have migrated from PMWiki to SoapBlox and in the process acquired some wonderful new capabilities, among them the option of having nested or threaded comments (you can keep the old forum comment organization if you want to, however) and full-fledged Diaries. First, let us say that the editorial "we" includes The Reveres in spirit but all the heavy lifting -- and we mean just about all of it -- was done by my wiki partners Dem, Melanie, pogge and SusanC (aka anon_22). It's a terrific job and everyone…

Thailand is bubbling

Thailand seems to have gone from "no bird flu in the country" two weeks ago to having the whole nation on alert. As the number of suspected bird-flu cases increases nationwide, Thailand Agriculture Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan declared Monday (July 31) all 76 provinces of the country animal epidemic control areas, with stricter rules on the transport of poultry and handling of dead birds. The move follows the mass culling of 300,000 chickens at 78 farms in Nakhon Phanom province on the weekend. (The Nation [Thailand]) Even more interesting is that they are following a godawful number of people…

A POWEr-ful Performance

image: illustration from the POWEr technical rider In discussing fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations Edward Einhorn identifies a pair of independent theatre collectives that incorporate advanced projection technology and even a Tesla coil into their performances. These groups (3LD and the Collective Unconscious) exemplify how far production and set design has come since the era of Einstein on the Beach—science is not only the stuff of inspiration, or a means to create illusions onstage but experimental technologies can be directly incorporated into a production and foregrounded as…

Docuinformatics and Historical Modeling

When asked about a discipline that would benefit from a more cross-disciplinary research approach, Nick Matzke proposed a data-driven approach to the study of history. While Matzke stressed that there is no replacement for "old-fashioned, document-based, interpretive history" he does sketch out a fascinating notion of quantitative history and wonders out loud if it might be possible to determine the degree to which various philosophical and aesthetic influences shaped the thinking of Adolf Hitler, and in turn the direction of the 20th century. Spurred by the ongoing digitization of everything…

Reading Diary: Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb is a real gem of a graphic novel, yet another stunning exemplar of what is possible with the graphic novel format. As I've often said, there are basically two kinds of science graphic novels -- those that use the format to illustrate the same content as a textbook would have on the theory that anything illustrated must be more accessible and enjoyable. And those that use the graphic novel format to its fullest, finding a new way to bring science to a mass audience. The latter, of course, if preferable. But I have to…