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The fatal lure of making stuff up

Two posts in one day! You do spoil us, ambassador. Whenever one or more denialists gather together or alone, they inevitably make something up about climatology, and then criticise climatologists for doing whatever imaginary thing it is they've made up. Today's invention is linearity (but, sigh, I'm giving too much credit for novelty, of which there is none. I mean, of course, reinvention): global climate models are all based around the idea that in the long run, when we calculate the global temperature everything else averages out, and we’re left with the claim that the change in temperature…

Infectious Molecular Clones

Astute ERV readers have noticed a couple of odd things about my research. 1- How the hell am I cutting and pasting bits of a retroviral (RNA) genome together? 2- How the hell do I have a (seemingly) endless supply of HIV-1 for my experiments? The answer to both questions is, infectious molecular clones! Short explanation-- Infectious molecular clones are just viral genomes (as DNA) inserted into plasmids. Even though plasmids are only found in bacteria (our cells have no idea what to do with the things), you can then use some chemistry tricks to get a mammalian cell line to read the plasmid…

Did Clarence Thomas Really Say This?

New Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, like former justice Roy Moore, is a bit of a controversial figure. He is, as Feddie from Southern Appeal put it, a Roy Moore clone. After being elected to that position, he had two different non-binding ceremonial swearings-in, one by Roy Moore and one by Clarence Thomas. This report on those ceremonies contains what I think is a stunning claim by Parker: Many stood and applauded former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore as he walked to the stage to administer the oath to Parker. Moore's action was ceremonial, since Parker took his formal oath of…

Marci Hamilton on the latest "Ten Commandments Judge"

Marci Hamilton has an excellent column reviewing the situation with Ashley McKathan, Alabama's latest Robin to Roy Moore's Batman. She points out something that so many on the right want to gloss over when claiming that the judge has a free speech or free exercise right to have the Ten Commandments embroidered on his sleeve: that the conduct allowed as a private citizen is not the same as the conduct allowed while acting as a government representative. Just like in the case with the San Diego police officer who was fired for making pornographic movies while in his officer's uniform, there is…

Poll Shows Risk of So-Con Overreach

I've said several times lately that the social conservatives, who are playing up the alleged "moral mandate" from the Presidential election, may well overplay their hand and end up getting smacked down by the electorate later for it. Here's a good example of why I think that. The religious right has tried to move heaven and earth to keep Arlen Specter from becoming chair of the Judiciary Committee, mobilizing a huge call-in to Senate offices and an enormous and coordinated campaign of outright lying about Specter's record and his statements. They've done so for one reason - because Specter is…

Happy Mother's Day, Mom

This is from an email that Lynn sent to me, that was sent to her by a friend of ours. I'm not going to paste the whole thing, just the last part of it because it really moved me. Lynn's mother died while giving birth to her; I lost my mother 8 years ago (for that incredible story, click here). So this has special meaning for both of us and I hope it does for some of you too, especially on Mother's Day. Your Mother is always with you. She's the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street, she's the smell of certain foods you remember, flowers you pick and perfume that she wore, she's…

Adventures in Creationism

I've spent some 15 years involved in the evolution vs creationism dispute, as any reader of this blog knows by now. Contrary to what some of my fellow evolution defenders say, all creationists are not "created" equal. They fall into quite a wide range of competency, intelligence and honesty. At the top of the credibility scale are people like Kurt Wise and Art Chadwick. While I obviously think they are completely wrong, these are very intelligent and well-educated men whose work should be taken seriously. On the other end we find some who are outright frauds, like Kent Hovind, and some who…

I hate this game!

Okay, so I love poker. But last night was the most frustrating night of poker I think I've ever had. We had a new guy at the game, Joe. He works near us and my brother invited him to the game. Joe was simply the worst poker player I've ever seen in my life. He lost at least $250 in less than an hour and a half by calling down every single hand, no matter what he had or what others potentially had. He'd stay on a 5 9 and the flop would come AK9 or AK5 and he would call big bets all the way to the showdown, turn over his bottom pair and be shocked that he didn't win. He was a total moron, and…

What's Wrong with America?

I'd like this to be an ongoing discussion between me and the readers of this page. It was motivated by a conversation with my brother, beginning with some shocking statistics. Did you know that the United States locks up 4 times as many of its citizens than any other western nation per capita? Did you know that despite this, the US is the most violent western nation by far? Murders per capita are 2.5 times higher than any other nation, rapes nearly 3 times higher. What I'd like to figure out is, why? What is it about American culture that breeds this sort of thing in numbers so…

FIRE on Columbia and Free Speech

When Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist had his speech disrupted and overrun by protestors a month ago, I wrote the following: And mark my words, Columbia won't do a thing about it. Not a single student will be disciplined for their actions. When Columbia President Lee Bollinger, himself a noted first amendment scholar, issued a strongly worded letter eloquently defending free speech, calling the incident "one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur" at a university and promsing "full accountability by those found to be responsible", I hoped i would be proven wrong in that…

More Computer Voting Problems

What kind of problems? Oh, nothing major. Vote for a Democrat, get counted as Republican. No big deal. Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist... A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said. Gee, what could possibly go…

More Anti-evolution Absurdity

The sociologist Rodney Stark, writing for the American Enterprise Institute (why? I have no idea), has given us a delightfully ridiculous little article called Fact, Fable and Darwin. Now ordinarily I take articles like this and rip them apart claim for claim, but I wanna try something different this time. I want to throw this one open to my readers to discover and point out to others all of the misrepresentations, distortions and outright falsehoods it contains. And believe me, they are vast in number. Indeed, the fact the article was written by an otherwise reputable scholar (writing far…

Book Report

It turns out that there's actually a small clause in the standard publishing contract that requires any author with a blog to post periodic updates on the progress of the current writing project. Who knew? Well, OK, there's no contractual obligation, but really, I have the blog, and I need to fill it with something, so why not the occasional progress report? I'm not going to commit to any particular schedule, but from time to time, I'll post updates on how things are going-- word counts, general impressions, out-of-context dialogue snippets. So, how is it going? The target here is around 40,…

Nijo-jinya, Kaiseki, Nara

No update yesterday, because we went to Nara, about an hour away by train, and hurried out to get an early start. Thursday was a light day, anyway-- the highlights were a visit to Nijo Jinya, which is a preserved Edo-period inn for feudal lords visiting Kyoto, and includes a number of slightly over-the-top security features for their protection. It's open by appointment only, and the tour is conducted in Japanese, but our hotel arranged a translator for us. Actually, there were two translators and a half translators, because there was another pair of foreigners on the tour, who had also…

Inference and Illiteralism

Two good "fundamentalism is stupid" posts over the weekend. First up is Scott Aaronson on rules of inference: In the study of rationality, there's a well-known party game: the one where everyone throws a number from 0 to 100 into a hat, and that player wins whose number was closest to two-thirds of the average of everyone's numbers. It's easy to see that the only Nash equilibrium of this game -- that is, the only possible outcome if everyone is rational, knows that everyone is rational, knows everyone knows everyone is rational, etc. -- is for everyone to throw in 0. Why? For simplicity,…

(OT) From Trayvon Martin to Kenneth Chamberlain

It is by now old news that George Zimmerman has finally been arrested for the unprovoked killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, 17 yr old African American teenager on his way home from the store with a bit of junk food. It took over a month and huge public outcry to get even this small step towards justice but it is the right first step. But in case you need something new to get outraged about I would like to call your attention to the equally, if not more, outrageous case of Kenneth Chamberlain's murder at the hands of Whiteplains NY police officers. Police were summoned to the scene for a…

The Bizarre Economics of Tuition

The Times had an article the other day about the warped economics of higher education: So early in 2000 the board [of Trustees of Ursinus College] voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen. Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454 students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost more, it must be better. "It's bizarre and it's…

You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!

There's a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. "Protein folding" is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins are normally found in only one configuration. Correctly predicting the folded configuration of a given protein is an extremely difficult computational problem. The paper highlighted by the AIP takes a new approach to the problem, employing some calculational…

Take the Bad with the Good

So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired. The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…

Are Physicists Smart?

In email, David Rosenthal asks my opinion of a rant at globalresearch.ca about the stupidity of physicists: Indeed, the modern professional physicist has usually subjected himself (less often herself) to extreme specialization, to be able to handle the technical side of the profession. This training is also largely about adopting the culture of the professional physicist: Examples and examples of what are "good problems - good questions" and what are "bad (= 'unmanageable') problems"; and examples and examples of how one tames a new problem and fits it into the mould of what a physicist can…

Show Me the Money

Inside Higher Ed notes in passing a new bill from the Senate supporting scientific research. There's a lot of bafflegab there, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can find the executive summary: More specifically, the Commerce and Science Division of the America COMPETES Act would: Increase Research Investment by: Establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research Program to direct federal agencies funding research in science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8% of their Research and Development (R&D) budgets toward high-risk frontier research. Authorizing the…

Dorky Poll: Seminars from Hell

Over at Biocurious, Phillip has a post on the generic science seminar outline: 1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from "well, not THAT long ago" is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh). 2. Esteemed Speaker takes over, and begins with a bunch of overly…

Problems with Middle School Math

EurekAlert had a press release yesterday regarding a new study on the training of middle-school math teachers. It's not pretty: Middle school math teachers in the United States are not as well prepared to teach this subject compared to teachers in five other countries, something that could negatively affect the U.S. as it continues to compete on an international scale. [...]MT21 studied how well a sample of universities and teacher-training institutions prepare middle school math teachers in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Bulgaria and Mexico. Specifically, 2,627 future teachers were…

Links for 2010-07-06

YouTube - Look Around You - Maths (With download) "I happened upon this inspired bit of British comedy after watching Goodness Gracious Me (hit and miss). I was curious why there would be a ten minute show on TV. At first, I actually thought it was a children's instructional science program. Indeed, it is easy to to be fooled. The tone, pacing, narration, are all uncannily like those insipid PBS programs I'd watch when home sick from school or when the teacher wanted a hour off during class." (tags: nostalgia science education silly video youtube) And Now We Go to the Mattresses; or,…

Links for 2010-04-11

Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » The Accidental Trilogy: Logan's Run, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man "The problem is, Lucas made [Star Wars] so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now on, an important aspect of all science-fiction movies would be, "Are the effects realistic?" The cinema of ideas was replaced, in that instant, by the cinema of visceral experience. Sci-fi became all about making you feel as if you were there, recreating the documentary feel of Star Wars instead of…

Football Round-Up

So, remember a month or two back when everybody was whining about how Michigan got screwed out of a shot at the Mythical National Championship? They lost to USC last night. USC, you'll recall, demonstrated their inferiority to Michigan by losing to UCLA, which is how they ended up in the Rose Bowl, rather than playing Ohio State for the MNC. How about the undefeated Boise State? The knock on them has always been that they play in a weak conference, and couldn't really hang with big conference teams. They beat Oklahoma last night, in a wild game, and end the season undefeated. What can we…

Any conservative can make an ass of themselves on Fox: Ben Stein gets crazy

Ben Stein is making a new movie (Expelled, have you heard of it?) that's supposed to be out in February, but right now he's building the excitement by making television appearances and demonstrating that he is a raving lunatic. Yeah, this is exactly the guy I want as the spokesman for Intelligent Design creationism. He's defending Larry Craig. It's promisingly incoherent, and here are his arguments, more or less in the order babbled. He's upset that the police arrested an Idaho senator when they're supposed to be busy chasing Al Quaeda. What is it with these wingnuts? We're supposed to…

MS + Yahoo = We are Doomed

My own personal experience with Yahoo is a tale of woe. Years ago, I co-moderated what was then the most heavily used Internet discussion forum on Human Evolution and related topics (which has since evolved into PalAnth. That group was on Yahoo. The three or four of us (depending on when) who moderated the group found ourselves, one day, with no superadmin account. The superadmin was a login that allowed important changes to be made, such as adding other moderators or admins, and so on. For some reason or another, the superadmin account had gone away, and we lost the ability to make…

How do I loathe thee ... let me count the ways.

Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago. In an essentially Christian society, we expect governmental or other social organizations to disrespect non-Christian belief systems. An example of this is the widespread positioning of official holidays on Christian holidays, but never unless by coincidence on, say, Jewish or Muslim holidays. The birth of Christ day is usually a day off. Spring break is often positioned along side Easter Sunday. and so on. A non-Christian religious person could get annoyed. It is also the case that an…

Exorcising the spectre of Haeckel again

In the comments, Art Hunt passes along a short analysis from Patrick Frank of the instances of Haeckel's work in a number of biology texts from 1923 to 1997. Even the oldest was critical of Haeckelian recapitulation, and only a minority used Haeckel's figure at all. I looked at 15 books in total. Where Haeckel's drawings appeared, that fact is noted. Where comment on Haeckel or his law is given, I have quoted the text faithfully, or in one case summarized, to give the flavor of the commentary. Of the 15 books, only 5 show Haeckel's drawings, two in whole, three in part. Of those 5, only…

Learn Physics At Home

Head First Physics: A learner's companion to mechanics and practical physics I have been watching these Heads Up guides for some time now, mainly in the context of computer software and development. I have not tried any of these guides in IT because, so far, I've felt that while they may be excellent learning resources, they were not ideal reference books, and that is usually what I am looking for. I may be a bit unusual in this regard, but I'm pretty happy reading a reference book from beginning to end, then using later ... as a reference book. In fact, I'd say my ideal combination of…

Reality is a constituency

Alan Sokal—who has a history of criticizing the irrational Left—and Chris Mooney—who has come down hard on the anti-science Right—have teamed up to write an op-ed that makes suggestions to keep both sides from falling into the same trap again. I think the root cause of the problem is that we have a democracy in which education is an insufficiently high priority, and either party can succumb to the temptation of going for votes by appealing to the most uneducated segment of the electorate. The Republican party has thrived in the past by going the other way, and building its base in the wealthy…

Exploring Your Inner Zebrafish (updated)

Minnesota Atheists' "Atheists Talk" radio show. Sunday, December 28, 2008, 9-10 a.m. Central Time Exploring Your Inner Zebrafish Listen this Sunday to Geneticist Dr. Perry Hackett and Evo Devo Biologist PZ Myers as they discuss the Top Life Science Stories of 2008. Big genome stories were everywhere in 2008. The cancer genome, the woolly mammoth genome, the synthetic genome revealed their secrets. Inexpensive genetic tests hit the market and new data on understanding human ancestry. Biologists also made headlines with high speed sequencing, pluripotent stem cells, RNA regulation, copy number…

Norm Coleman Is Going Down

But he's going down fighting. First, the going down part: This concerns Paul McKim, who is the former CEO of a Houston company, Deep Marine Technologies Inc.. He has filed a lawsuit in district court in Harris County, Texas that alleges that a majority shareholder, Minneapolis based Nasser Kazeminy, used corporate funds to help Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman. Accoring to the suit, Kazeminy... ...directed $75,000 to an insurance company that contracted with Coleman's wife, Laurie Coleman, under the guise that the payments were for services. McKim also alleges that Kazeminy and another co…

Happy Birthday Ana

Ana One of my favorite commenters, and a good friend off line, known to you as Ana, is having a birthday today. Born on the Fourth of July, she is one of the most patriotic individuals I've ever met in my life. In a radical overthrow the government if necessary kind of way. Although we fight sometimes our love and friendship always wins. Happy 25th plus/minus birthday Ana! Now that you've been introduced, I can tell you an Ana story. One year, quite a few yeas back, I was having one of those down periods ... life was ruined, everything sucked, you know the story. It was Christmas…

Sunday Chess Problem

This week we have very clever helpmate from Russian composer Viktor Chepizhny, that was published in the November 2014 issue of The Problemist magazine. The diagram below calls for helpmate in two. There are two solutions: Recall that in a helpmate black moves first and cooperates with white to contrive a position in which black is checkmated in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Normal chess logic does not apply! To be clear, we are looking for a sequence of this form: black moves, white moves, black moves, white gives mate. You should keep in mind that white is moving up…

Whedonpalooza!

It is finished. My grading, I mean. Over the last few days I have graded roughly one thousand math problems, some of which were even done correctly. But that's all finished now. Except for graduation tomorrow, the semester is now over! Yay! So what better way to celebrate than with a little Joss Whedon film festival? For the clueless ones among you, Whedon is responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. (And Firefly, of course.) First up was The Cabin in the Woods, which Whedon co-wrote with Buffy writer Drew Goddard. Brilliant! A masterpiece! If you have any taste for…

Virginia is for loons

I have to visit Loudon, Virginia someday. It's where Corsair the Rational Pirate lives, and I think the streets must be humming with dancing clowns and village idiots twirling and a marching kazoo band. I've seen stupid creationist arguments before, but these, that were actually published in his local paper, take the cake. John Miller has an amazing argument from probability and relativity and the fact that the laws of physics don't evolve that has to be seen to be believed. Here's just his conclusion. You cannot have randomness. If you do, you can never science (know) a subject because there…

There was an old lady who swallowed a bat (and its viruses) to catch the insects (and their viruses) to catch the plants (and their viruses) and there are some bacteria in there too (and their viruses)...

If theres one question I get over and over and over and over on ERV, its this one: What kind of viruses are in bat poop?? Until yesterday, I had no idea what to tell the millions of people sending me that Q. Thank GAWD daedalus2u sent me a link to this awesome paper! Bat Guano Virome: Predominance of Dietary Viruses from Insects and Plants plus Novel Mammalian Viruses While Im being silly about this, the viruses that infect bats are a really big deal. Im sure youve heard of rabies (if you find a bat in your house and it bites/scratches you, you need to go see a physician ASAP). But bats…

Why does HIV-1 have to integrate?

Awesome reader question time! Hi ERV, I've got a question about retroviruses that is probably simple, but none of my virology/micro lecturers have been able to answer it (they aren't HIV researchers) - why is integration of the retroviral genome necessary for productive infection? It's got the LTR promoter and all of the genes still, so after reverse transcription, why can't it just hang around outside the chromosome making virus babies, like the DNA viruses? Obviously it's not the case, or else integrase inhibitors and the like would do jack all, but I can't see why. Thats a good question!…

We are exposed to more viruses as we age. In other words, A VIRUS IS MAKIN MAH BABBY FAT!

Revenge of teh Chubby Virus! I know you all have seen the headlines. Again. More evidence links a virus to obesity, this time in childrenâ Study: Children Exposed to Adenovirus-36 Likely to Get Obeseâ Virus Is Linked To Obesity Can a Cold Lead to Childhood Obesity? Adenovirus 36 and Obesity in Children and Adolescents Adenoviruses are ubiquitous. Weve all been infected with lots of them (gets to be a problem when making gene therapy vectors). The older you are, the more likely you have been exposed to the different kinds of adenovirus, to the point where if you are an adult reading this,…

Green our vaccines!

Antivaxers want green vaccines? How about vaccines produced in plants? Solar powered, green leafy plants-- Cant get much more green than that! The basic idea is that we modify plants to make viral/bacterial proteins, and then we eat the plants, and YAY! Vaccine! How could this possibly work? Doesnt everything just get digested? Well, there are a lot of viruses/bacteria that need your intestines to infect you-- Polio, enteric bacteria like salmonella and E. coli and cholera, rotavirus, norovirus, etc. Then you have viruses/bacteria that just want some kind of mucosal site (eyes, mouth,…

Sacrifice bunt to left field: Tiny kinda sorta win for anti-HIV-1 therapies

Last week I wrote about a disappointing study where they found that treating people infected with HIV-1 and HSV-2 with acyclovir didnt decrease their rates of HIV-1 transmission to their partners... even though they had lower HIV-1 viral loads, and fewer HSV-2 outbreaks. Really disappointing. Well, that same group reanalyzed their data from a different angle: The people who got acyclovir, how did that effect their progression to AIDS? Daily aciclovir for HIV-1 disease progression in people dually infected with HIV-1 and herpes simplex virus type 2: a randomised placebo-controlled trial-- Our…

From poison to potential panacea

Right-wing pundits/Conservatives/the Usual Suspects hate how much money the government has spent/is spending on HIV/AIDS. "No one gets AIDS but homos and blacks, so why the hell is the government spending all this money on AIDS and not cancer?" (random example) There is a pattern Im seeing in these kinds of people: They are stupid, and they have an inability to delay gratification. Example: HIV/AIDS research does not only benefit HIV/AIDS patients. Our understanding of the human immune system and cell biology has increased exponentially because of HIV/AIDS research, which has far reaching…

ERV + Cancer = Virus???

Whoa! I dont know how much stock to put into this particular paper, but some (potentially) incredible data just came out in Journal of Virology: Human endogenous retrovirus K (HML-2) elements in the plasma of people with lymphoma and breast cancer HERV-K (human endogenous retroviral family K) are the babies of human ERVs-- they are the youngest addition to our genome (they became endogenous 200,000-5 million years ago), and related to a mouse retrovirus, MMTV. These scientists did something kind of odd. They looked at patients that were healthy, had Rheumatoid Arthritis, HIV-associated…

Paleovirology

Holy crap. Do you guys remember how Per Ahlberg got his big break? He sifted through the fossil collection at the London Natural History Museum, found friggen tetrapod? Someone just did the same thing with HIV-1. Michael Worobey dug through prehistoric (1960s hehe) tissue samples hunting for early HIV-1 sequences. Now by 'tissue samples' I dont mean nicely labeled bits of tissue, organized and cataloged in bright fluorescent boxes, in perfect little cryovials, stored at -80 C. I mean dude dug through chunks of flesh soaked in formaldehyde and embedded in wax, and have been sitting at room…

Craig and Cable News

It seems that Larry Craig is not resigning: Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, defying the wishes of many in his own Republican Party, said Thursday that he would remain in the Senate through next year despite a court ruling against him in Minnesota, where he had sought to rescind his guilty plea stemming from an undercover sex sting. Shortly after a judge denied his request to withdraw the August plea admitting to disorderly conduct, Mr. Craig said he had reversed his previously announced decision to leave the Senate if he could not get the plea thrown out. He said he would instead serve out…

Stopped Clock Department

While I was slumming over at Dembski's blog I cam across a link to this article, by right-wing superhack David Horowitz. Apparently Dembski's crew thought this little essay was helpful to the cause. Horowitz is discussing the horrors perpetrated by Women's Studies Departments in the name of “Social Constructivism:” A year ago the biggest issue in education after budgets was whether “Intelligent Design” should be taught in the nation's schools. Opponents called it a form of “creationism” and the press dubbed the ensuing legal battle as the biggest clash between faith and science since the…

It's the Little Things...

Small observations of things that have struck me as weird during our UK stay to this point: -- There is no alarm clock in our hotel room. -- There are no drinking fountains in public spaces. -- The travel-on-the-left thing would be easier if it were consistently applied. About one stairway in three asks people to go up the right side instead, and for some reason the escalator etiquette is to stand on the right, walk on the left. (That last is sort of a moot point at Worldcon, given the tendency of many fans to just plop themselves squarely in the middle of the steps and block everything up…

Why Is Girls' Soccer So Dangerous?

Over at Five Thirty Eight, Walt Hickey has a piece about cheerleading as a sport and injury rates, which is both a nice look at the way to use stats to measure the real danger level of an activity, and the sort of small details that can be teased out. The piece includes a table of injury rates for a wide variety of sports, seen above as the "featured image" and reproduced below. I don't really have anything much to say about cheerleading, but one thing did jump out at me from the table, leading to the question in the post title. this table show concussion rates in competition and in practice…