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Turns out I have a blog. Who knew! A combination of lack of time and, frankly, lack of enthusiasm have kept me from the blogosphere lately, but I thought I would poke my head up just to let y'all know I'm still here. So let's see. I have a busy weekend on tap. Tomorrow is JMU's annual Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (SUMS) conference. It promises to be a big math party! I will be running the poster session. Of course, it goes against my grain to get up early on a Saturday, but once a year I will make an exception. Then on Sunday there is the big Science Expo in…

Wisdom from the Independent

Writing in the British newspaper The Independent, Michael Reiss and John White have an interesting suggestion about the school curriculum in England: It is a laudable aim of the current National Curriculum that pupils "know about big ideas and events that shape the world". But one of the biggest of these is too infrequently studied in schools. We are thinking of the growing loss of faith, over the past two centuries, in a religious picture of the world. David Hume's 18th-century onslaught on arguments for the existence of God was an early catalyst, Darwin's 19th-century attack on what today…

links for 2009-07-10

P.G. Wodehouse | Books | A.V. Club "Logistics and aesthetics stand in the way of anyone wishing to dive into P.G. Wodehouseâs canon. His work sprawls over 90 books published over 75 years, most of which are constantly sneaking in and out of print, many of which have different British and American publication titles. His short-story collections tend to overlap and make each other redundant. But the issue of distance from the material can be even more challenging for novices. People Gateways To Geekerycontinue to read Wodehouse primarily for the structural perfection of his farce plots and…

Links for 2011-02-26

Go To Hellman: HarperCollins and the Suspension of eBook Disbelief "A good business requires a good story. The customer needs to understand the story of how the business can help solve a problem or deliver a benefit. There are many ways of telling a business story. Some stories are utilitarian; others are romantic or inspiring. Many stories require the consumer's willing suspension of disbelief. This isn't dishonesty, but the customer has to benefit broadly from a business's services and not be harmed by bits of the story that aren't really true. Macs sometimes crash. Facebook sometimes…

Evolution and fossils

Donald Prothero asked me to pass along this request for feedback. He wrote an excellent book on evolution (with illustrations by the inimitable Carl Buell) that beautifully complements the theory with the details of common descent. If you've read it — I'm working on my copy now — let him know what you think! EVOLUTION AND FOSSILS Last night's Nova program did an outstanding job, given the nature of their show and the time limits imposed by their format. But we still have a long way to go to convey to the general public just how strong the fossil evidence for evolution has become. Those few…

Annual Request: Christmas Songs That Don't Suck

As you can see from the picture at right, we've got our Christmas tree up, waiting to surprise SteelyKid when she comes home in a couple of hours. This also means it's getting toward the time when I switch over to the holiday music playlist on iTunes. Christmas music is, of course, a problematic genre. I spent half an hour in a toy store the other day, looking for stuff for SteelyKid, and the entire time that I was there, the only song that played was "The Christmas Song." After six different versions of that, I was more than ready to roast somebody's chestnuts. So, it's time for the annual…

Links for 2010-11-24

From the Editor's Desk: Quantifying Outreach to the Cult of Science | Deep Sea News "Science needs a reality check too. It has tried to exist in an academic vacuum for much of its existence. The OCD nature science needs behavioral therapy, to be forced to confront its discomfort of engaging with non-scientists. Science also needs to acknowledge that there is value in this engagement. That it is not only the public that benefits from engagement (i.e. science literacy/appreciation), but science benefits just as much. Very few academic institutions wholly recognize this and science's ability…

Short Story Club: "The Heart of a Mouse" by K. J. Bishop

This week's Short Story Club story is "The Heart of a Mouse" by K. J. Bishop, from Subterranean Press (which means I'm faintly surprised not to have to pay $15 for it). I recognize Bishop's name, and think I have a copy of The Etched City upstairs that I've never gotten around to reading, but don't think I've read anything of hers before. This is an after-the-magic Apocalypse story. Some time before the start of the story, there was a dramatic and magic change in the world, with basically all high technology disappearing, and people being turned into anthropomorphic animals. Most people…

Packaging Technology... of the Future!

I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up…

Links for 2010-02-02

Is Our Students Learning? « Easily Distracted "That's what I worry about when I hear that there are too many "relativists" around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering. "a (tags: academia education politics blogs easily-distracted philosophy ethics society culture) Career Advice: Balance Is a Myth - Inside Higher Ed "Most tenure-track faculty members I work with seem to believe that they can achieve harmonious balance in their lives during the tenure-track years. To me, this is a…

Links for 2009-12-17

slacktivist: Preferring nightmares "What I don't get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers? But the Tea Partiers cling to these nightmares with a desperate ferocity. They get angrily defensive at the suggestion that this world isn't actually as horrific as they're pretending…

On Market Rates

There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous situation for non-fiction is (being that I am vastly more likely to be paid money for non-fiction pieces than fiction). Of course, I can't claim a long list of sales that I can list as my contribution to the discussion. I've only had a handful of pieces printed in commercial outlets: two pieces (so…

Teams Who Are Ahead Win More Frequently

Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph: Explained by Wolfers thusly: The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…

What Do You Do Well?

ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question: You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?" It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame: What is one thing in your professional life that you do…

links for 2009-01-15

slacktivist: Gerbils and polar bears "What I'm trying to say here is a bit tricky, because it involves to some extent comparing those Palin supporters to Grandin's neurotic gerbils, and I don't suppose anyone likes being compared to neurotic gerbils. And it probably doesn't help that I'm prefacing this by saying that I mean no offense in comparing them to neurotic gerbils. But I find the comparison illustrative, so here goes." (tags: politics psychology society culture US religion biology slacktivist) FemaleScienceProfessor: In Praise of B Students "When choosing undergrad research…

links for 2008-12-23

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media » Far from the Peer-Reviewed Journal,Scientists Confront How-Tos of Op-Eds "So how can scientists strategically convey their messages to a broad audience without losing the nuances of their field? " (tags: science politics writing journalism) Christmas, please, but hold the treacle: 42 holiday entertainments that don't make us want to claw our eyes out with rage | The A.V. Club Does not include Pratchett's Hogfather, probably because it's too British, but it's better than almost anything that did make the list. (tags: culture television…

The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

If you're reading this shortly after it's posted, you may notice ads for this book popping up in the sidebar and on top of the page. This is probably not entirely a happy coincidence-- I was offered a review copy in email from the author and his publisher, and I suspect that they had ScienceBlogs on their radar as a likely forum for web publicity. With a title like The Drunkard's Walk, the book could be about one of two things, and the subtitle "How Randomness Rules Our Lives" pretty much rules out any Hunter S. Thompson style gonzo ranting. This is a book about probability and statistics,…

Matthew Hughes, Majestrum [Library of Babel]

Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is part of a linked series of novels and stories set in a distant future in which the rational rules of logic and science governing our universe are beginning to weaken and give way toa new age goverened by "sympathetic association," better known as magic. He's been writing these for a while, and they've been bouncing around from one publisher to another, trying to find a home. He may well have found a niche at Night Shade Books, one of the high-quality small presses that have sprung up in recent years. It's not clear that what Hughes is doing will appeal to a…

Ignominy

For the first time in forever, the NCAA Tournament will start this weekend, and I won't have a clear rooting interest. Neither Syracuse nor Maryland made the field of 65. This is, of course, karmic blowback from the Giants winning the Super Bowl-- the last time they won, Syracuse became the first #2 seed ever to lose to a #15 seed. It's going to be an odd experience, but I'm basically ok with it, because neither team deserved to be there. They had their chances to make a case, but bother stumbled badly down the stretch. Maryland lost its last three games in inexcusable fashion, and Syracuse…

I get email

Did someone rattle the monkey cage recently? I have been getting a sudden wave of email from defenders of Kent Hovind, which is not good. Of all the creationists, Hovind spawns the most illiterate, incomprehensible mess; I think you have to be of very low intelligence to find anything at all appealing in that guy. Anyway, here are two examples. I'd kind of like to be game-fully employed — does that mean I just sit around all day playing games? Because I suppose that could be fun. Your assessment of Kent Hovind You are an arrogant jackass. Your pompousness is only exceeded by your stupendous…

Another Reason to be Anti-War

I don't think there is anyone left in the USA who seriously believes that the war in Iraq was a good idea.  Most accept it as fact, that lies were told to get the public on board with the war, and that war crimes have been committed.   It is clear at this point that the only motive for this was was profit.  It certainly had nothing to do with national security.  Although the war could have been led with an humanitarian goal (to free the people of Iraq from a dictator), that clearly was never the intent. But what I'm writing about today is different.  Today, we see that the Administration is…

Tamoxifen Abuse

Sometimes, when I write about new psychotropic medication coming to market, I include a comment on the abuse potential.  For example, I've commented before on the relative lack of abuse potential for  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozerem" rel="tag">ramelteon ( href="http://www.rozerem.com/home_c.aspx" rel="tag">Rozerem) and href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil" rel="tag">modafinil ( href="http://www.provigil.com/" rel="tag">Provigil).  Usually, I end with a disclaimer: "but some people will abuse anything." Despite that universal disclaimer, I really never…

The odorous house ant becomes pesty, over and over again

Tapinoma sessile, the odorous house ant, with larvae Last summer I replaced the old covering on our porch roof. When I peeled back the rotting shingles, I was greeted by a frenzy of frenetic brown ants- thousands of them- running about every which way. Dozens of fat queens scurried for cover. It was an impressive display of formicid infestation, reminiscent of the swarms of invasive Argentine ants in California. But these weren't exotic pests. This was a native species, Tapinoma sessile, whose pleasant blue-cheese odor lends it the name  "odorous house ant". Tapinoma sessile is found…

Ants in the spamoverse

It's no secret to anyone with an email inbox that the real internet is shadowed by a fake internet. The fake internet is full of fake blogs, fake web sites, fake discussion forums, and fake emails.  All full of real links to real companies who pay someone money to increase their visibility by gaming the Google rankings using vast and vacuous link farms. Anyway. I usually ignore this parallel universe, but this morning I found something entertaining and ant-related. Repeated instances of what looks like a bad student essay were splashed across dozens of sites in the spamoverse, each with…

New genes for studying beetle evolution (or, blogging my own research)

Our first paper from the Beetle Tree of Life study has been published. Here's the citation: Wild, A. L. & Maddison, D. R. 2008. Evaluating nuclear protein-coding genes for phylogenetic utility in beetles. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.023 My co-author David Maddison once summarized the point of the paper as "Hey guys! New genes!" What we've done is develop lab protocols for sequencing 8 nuclear genes that should be particularly useful for inferring the evolutionary history of beetles.  It's a foundational paper.  We created the methods that will…

Reflections on turning thirty

As Alice kindly announced, today is my 30th birthday. The day got off to a rough start, but a little time ignoring work, eating a lovely organic lunch, reading some Pride and Prejudice, and then eating too much ice cream has turned the day into quite a lovely experience. Anyways, before my natal day expires, I thought I'd seize the chance to wax on a bit about where my thoughts wandered as my third decade waned. For months, I've been looking forward to my 30th birthday. I'm a mother to a two year old. I'm in my second year on the tenure track. I own my second house. That combination of…

Sexy autism education PSA videos from Rethinking Autism: What would Prof Nisbet (and you) say about this framing?

RethinkingAutism.com is the brainchild of Dana Commandatore, a friend of one of my high school classmates. Dana is a former NYC advertising guru and the mother of Michaelangelo, a child with autism. His story inspired her to write the children's book, Michaelangelo the Diver. Dana has now taken her creativity and contacts in her new home of Los Angeles to produce a series of controversial public service announcements to combat misinformation about the causes and treatment of autism and the acceptance and celebration of neurodiversity. Here is the spirit in which they are presented: All too…

Acupuncturist FAIL

A recent business sojourn to Key West, FL, gave your intrepid blogger (who still has yet to set up his own CafePress swag shop) an opportunity to revisit a story we first discussed in February of an acupuncturist being arrested on three felony charges for obtaining controlled substances by forgery. Commenter ebohlman noted at the time the address of the acupuncturist's practice: Duck Avenue? Is that where all the quacks have their practices? While I expressed some sympathy for the practitioner if she were addicted to narcotics, I also feared that she might have used some of the drugs to…

It's this kind of stuff that gives pharma a bad name: selling fibromyalgia

I know that many of you have seen this article by Matthew Perronne since it was picked up by the majority of AP outlets this morning: Two drugmakers spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year to raise awareness of a murky illness, helping boost sales of pills recently approved as treatments and drowning out unresolved questions -- including whether it's a real disease at all. Key components of the industry-funded buzz over the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia are grants -- more than $6 million donated by drugmakers Eli Lilly and Pfizer in the first three quarters of 2008 -- to…

The motivation of disease

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. While the WSJ is often most associated by us lefties with its conservative op-ed page, the Journal has consistently maintained a high standard for science and medical reporter (which I hope continues under Rupert Murdoch). With that said, Jacob Goldstein today brings us a good news post on childhood cancer survivor, Dr Trevor Banka, who is now doing his oncology residency (presumably surgical oncology) at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital with Dr Michael Mott. Mott is the very same surgeon who operated on Banka's…

Wishing Stetson Kennedy a Happy 92nd Birthday

The author, human rights activist, folklorist, and environmentalist, Stetson Kennedy, is celebrating his 92nd birthday today in the company of friends and family near St. Augustine, Florida. His website, StetsonKennedy.com, used to have a guestbook but the webmaster, his grandson Sean, took it down after extensive spamming. So, please leave your birthday wishes in the comments below as we have it on very good authority that those close to Stetson actually read Terra Sigillata. Much of my generation probably only knows Stetson Kennedy as the Klan-busting infiltrator popularized in…

I get email

At the end of February, I've mentioned that a flack from Answers in Genesis will be appearing in Morris. I guess the local hosts of that event are a little worried that I might breathe fire over their little church, so they just sent me a note. Professor Myers, I am the local coordinator for the Answers in Genesis conference which will be held in Morris on Feb. 27 and 28 featuring Dr. Terry Mortenson. I realize that there is a lot of real estate between our opinions on this subject. My hope is that we create a respectful discussion about this issue which will be challenging. I would…

Heavy metals in foods: more trouble for China

We've spoken on several occasions about heavy metal contamination of herbal products, especially in light of this highly-cited JAMA paper. Part of the problem is that plants will bioaccumulate heavy metas, especially when grown in soils rich in these natural and industrial products. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Chinese are having issues with foods grown in "hot spot" soils such as those on former industrial sites or subjected to mining runoff (free full-length article reprinted at Moneyweb) Ms. Lai, along with 57 other villagers, was eventually diagnosed with high levels…

Safer source of glycerin

After worries over the last few weeks of diethylene glycol being substituted for glycerin in cough syrup and toothpaste, I was happy to be reminded that we have a green source for glycerin. No need to risk using Chinese-sourced glycerin - glycerin (glycerol) is a by-product of biodiesel production. But rather than sell it for pharmaceutical uses, researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia are investigating the biodiesel by-product for use in cattle feed: In a study that began this month, Monty Kerley, professor of ruminant nutrition in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural…

Who are you and why are you here?

Many moons ago in blog years, RealJournalist&trade and Not Exactly Rocket Science blogger Ed Yong queried his readers to learn who they were and why they read him by answering some questions in the comment thread. Now that he has moved over to Discover, Ed has launched his query anew and blog brother DrugMonkey has tagged other science bloggers to do the same. Why? Well, I actually asked readers for similar input back in December when I celebrated my 4th anniversary of writing Terra Sigillata. We're now drawing about 1,300 people dialing up our blog daily yet only a good post will draw…

El Rio Community Health Center honored with 2009 APhA Pinnacle Award

As I have said on occasion, the health care insurance reform debate seems to have underestimated the role of the clinically-trained pharmacist in improving care and cutting health care costs. Hands-on community-based drug management models have been operating around the US with far less fanfare than cut-rate prescriptions at Wal-Mart or CVS Caremark. So I was delighted to learn via Phoenix pharmacist commenter, Michael Guzzo, that El Rio Community Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, was recognized this past summer with a 2009 Pinnacle Award from the American Pharmacists Association (APhA)…

The nightmare at NASA is over

The report of NASA's Office of the Inspector General on the clumsy attempts to censoring climate science makes for a most enjoyable read. We can laugh now that it's over, I mean. There are lots of gems among the overall finding the a small cabal of political appointees in the public affairs office tried to delay or bury new findings on climate change. Here, then are some of my favorites: ...we believe that many of these scientists (and the majority of career Public Affairs Officers interviewed) would argue that the actions of NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs -- in delaying, unduly…

Dick Cheney hates the whales

You'd think that the vice-president would have better things to do than try to make life difficult for one of the most endangered species on the planets. But then, you'd be wrong. Via Talking Points Memo, we learn that Dick Cheney's office has been refusing to let the federal government establish new speed limits for boat traffic in northern right whale territory. We know this thanks to the efforts of the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Henry Waxman, who has released an April 30 letter to Susan Dudley, administrator of the Office of Information and…

The Physics of the Ponytail

The first major computer-animated film was Toy Story. It had a few human characters, most prominently Andy (who spends most of the film wearing a hat) and Sid (who sports a buzz cut). The focus of the film is on the plastic toys. One of the major reasons for this is the fact that toys are pretty simple. They have just a few moving parts for the computer to keep track of during the rendering process. People have many more. Every hair on a person's head really consists of many moving parts, since it can bend anywhere along its length to various degrees. And there are around a hundred thousand…

Sunday Function

A reader asked me about the hyperbolic trig functions, sinh(x) and cosh(x). What are they for, and do they have an intuitive interpretation in physics? That's a pretty good question. After all, most of the time you first meet the hyperbolic trig functions in intro calculus, where their rather odd definitions are presented and then used as test beds for blindly applying newly-learned differentiation rules. Ok, great. But what are they really? To answer the question, we should start off with Euler's identity, which relates the exponential function with the regular trig functions. Proving this…

Calories and Climbing

Apropos of the calorie/Calorie discussion yesterday, here's something interesting to think about with regard to the energy used in exercise. The formula for gravitational potential energy is m*g*h, where m is mass, g is the acceleration due to gravity, and h is the height. Of course this is if the changes in h are small enough so that g can be taken as truly constant. So any change in height is going to require energy if you're going up, and will release energy if you're going down. This is why you hit the gas driving up a hill and hit the brake going down a hill. Actually since we're…

The Gravity of the Situation

I see that bailout is working wonderfully. Of course if it hadn't passed and the stock market had behaved identically, we be hearing that we were fools not to pass the bailout. And they would be wrong. Yes, I know God Emperor Paulson hasn't actually used any of his trillion dollar blank check yet. It won't make a difference. Give a cowboy all the expensive equipment in the world and he still won't be able to herd clouds. C'est la vie. There's nothing to be done about that though so let's talk about gravity. The force due to gravity between objects with masses M and m is given by the…

Naming Momentum

Physicists like to name things after their discoverers. Sometimes if there's a unit of measurement that doesn't have someone's name attached to it, they'll grab the name of somebody who worked in that field and use it. Let's take a look at some units, first a few examples not named after people: Length - meter Mass - kilogram Time - second There's a couple more slightly obscure units not named after people, but most units are named after somebody. Sometimes repeatedly: Temperature - Kelvin, Celsius Current - Ampere Electric Potential - Volt (the guy's name was Volta, but close enough)…

Charging the Earth

Teaching Physics 201 has me digging out some of my old favorite concept-y problems. Nothing dramatic in the mathematics, but at the 201 level you can't even assume knowledge of derivatives. But you can try to catch their minds with interesting examples. Here's a classic one: You've got the earth and the moon. They have mass and so they attract each other with gravity. Both the earth and the moon are pretty large, and so the attraction is considerable. On the scale of earthbound undergraduate lab equipment however, gravity from anything but the earth is pretty hard to measure. Pretty…

What Impulse Is.

This is Zhang Juanjuan, immediately after applying an impulse to an arrow. Impulse is something which gets less airtime than work in freshman physics, but it's nonetheless very important. It's sort of momentum's version of work. You'll remember from Monday that there are two main things to keep in mind about work. 1. Work is defined as force through a distance 2. Work equivalent to the change in energy You can think of impulse the same way. 1. Impulse is defined as a force thorough a time 2. Impulse is equivalent to the change in momentum Crucially, impulse is a vector and work is not.…

Sail Away

Weekend posting here is usually pretty light, but it's only the second day here so I think a little extra is a nice way to kick things off. How about a little bit of solar sailing, since it fits pretty well with what I'm teaching in my intro class? We all know light carries energy. Go outside on a sunny day and you can feel the energy being absorbed by your skin. You feel it as heat, but visible light energy allows you to see and ultraviolet light will induce chemical changes which will finally result in your body making itself a bit more tan. What's less apparent is that light also…

Research Blog of the Year

Image, ironically, from FailBlog Warning: this post contains sentiment. If you are cynical and/or British, you might want to avert your eyes. Alternatively, read this and then go watch some Charlie Brooker. For those of you still around, bear with me. It is really hard to write something like this without falling into an abyss of clichés. A couple of days ago, Dave Munger, under a veil of tightest secrecy, told me that I've won the big prize in the first ever Research Blogging Awards. Not Exactly Rocket Science is apparently the Research Blog of the Year, as well as Best Lay-Level Blog and…

Molecule's constant efforts keep our memories intact

Our mind often seems like a gigantic library, where memories are written on parchment and stored away on shelves. Once filed, they remain steadfast and inviolate over time, although some may eventually become dusty and forgotten. Now, Reut Shema, Yadin Dudai and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science have found evidence that challenges this analogy. According to their work, our memory is more like a dynamic machine - it requires a constant energy supply to work. Cut the power and memories are lost. Shema found that the plug that powers our memories is an enzyme called PKMzeta…

True or False? With regards to Pokemon and the challenges of biodiversity

In the scientific literature, the use of characters from the Pokemon franchise has been suggested as a possible way to broach biodiversity and conservation challenges. True. Specifically, this is in reference to a short letter that was published in Science in 2002 (29 March 2002. Vol 295: 2367) and entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon." It starts: According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desite to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms. This in turn provides a powerful aesthetic argument for combating the present extinction…

The science (sort of) behind Raisin Bran - revealed at last!

A couple weeks ago, the SCQ published a piece called "What's the Scoop? A Quantitative Analysis of Kellogg's Raisin Bran," which aimed to take a proper look at the nomenclature behind the descriptor of "two scoops." Anyway, it was a great research orientated piece, fitting for the SCQ given its double nature as being both esoteric and intriguing. For instance, the authors were working on two hypotheses which were as follows: (A) Scoop size is independent of box size. In other words, the same scoops are used to add raisins to each box, regardless of box size, so that the number of raisins…