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A brief note on the importance of science journalists

Carl Zimmer Live Blogging The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?, reports that: 2:14 Lisa Pratt of Indiana University is talking biology. She is stoked. 2:15 Okay, I mean as stoked as scientists get at press conferences where they talk about photic zones. You can see it in the rise of her eyebrows. Now, a reporter used to covering press conferences on the steps of a courthouse or a state or federal capitol would not catch that as "stoked." But Carl Zimmer covers scientists, and he knows what we look like when we're excited. That means his article about this will convey her excitement, and…

A reminder

Gristmill reminds us that They are called nonprofits for a reason ...: It's the end of the year, and if your inbox is anything like mine, you've received a deluge of end-of-year donation requests from your favorite nonprofits. On behalf of my brethren nonprofit directors, let me share some insight into current nonprofit funding dynamics before you hit the delete button. First, this was an extraordinary election year. Obama, for example, set fundraising records, and while individual donations are not necessarily a zero sum game, let's take you for an example. Maybe you are thinking -- hey, I…

Palin-spastic: Mens vacuus

Jonathan Martin's Blog: In reintroduction, Palin to do more interviews and "tell her story" - Politico.com: Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing. The [anonymous] Palin aide … revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions. After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases. There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather…

Cheap genetic tests (but we get to keep the data)

Dr. Daniel MacArthur reports on shenanigans in his homeland, Australian insurance company offers discounted genome scans to customers; read the fine print!: A reader pointed me to this article in the Australian news: it appears that a major Australian insurance company, NIB, is planning to offer half-price genome scans from personal genomics company Navigenics to 5,000 of its customers. The catch is in the fine print: those who take up the offer "may have to give the information to life insurance or superannuation providers", according to the article. In a letter to customers, the chief…

The warfare state

A few weeks ago I remarked on the relatively high current defense spending for the United States. In hindsight I think this was somewhat unfair, the proportion of the budget that the United States spends on defense is rather small in a world-historical context. I was reminded of this by a datum in The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (highly recommended by the way), even this exceedingly civilian dynasty allocated ~80% of its budgetary outlays toward military expenses. Historical surveys of the Roman Empire also infer that most of the expenditure was directed toward…

Tiny dogs are freaks of evolution

Sometimes scientists report on research which clarifies what we already know. 'Survival of the Cutest' Proves Darwin Right: The study, published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to which dogs belong along with cats, bears, weasels, civets and even seals and walruses. It found that the skull shapes of domestic dogs varied as much as those of the whole order. It also showed that the extremes of diversity were farther apart in domestic dogs than in the rest of the order. This…

Those humanitarian founders!

Darwin's idea has cost lives: Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in…

An example of framing

What is this photograph about? In one setting, this is a story about water. It even says so in the top left corner. In a post about water policy or aquifers in Kansas, you'd have no trouble appreciating this as an illustration. That isn't what I was thinking when I took the picture though. Framed and hanging on a gallery wall, this is a photograph about circles, and of circles within circles. If I were talking about interpreting art, or using the camera lens to frame the subject, this photograph is still a natural illustration. The context of the presentation is a frame. You experience…

Corrections

Bounce Boyda is very excited. The found a small error in my comments about Congresswoman Boyda. I stated that yesterday was the end of the fundraising quarter when today is the end. That means you can still donate. This error inspired an error-laden post from them, a post filled with misspellings ("dillusion?") and their own fantastical imaginings about what Congress has done. Contrary to what BB claims, there never were votes to cut military base spending, to raise taxes, or to take away secret ballots. The tax rate changes were part of the bills that the Republican Congress passed, the…

House passes Iraq supplemental over Tiahrt and Moran's opposition

The bill provides funds for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan?), as well as funds for critical upgrades to military bases in Kansas. It also requires that "units should not be deployed for combat unless they are rated 'fully mission capable'" by the Pentagon, that – in accordance with DoD regulations "Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard units should not be deployed for combat beyond 365 days or that Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve units should not be deployed for combat beyond 210 days," and imposes benchmarks to help Congress judge the progress of…

Last leg of Sb/DonorsChoose drive: maximizing our impact.

It's been two weeks since we kicked off our first ever ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for math and science classrooms. In that time, 172 generous readers have donated a total of $13,685.14 and SEED has kicked in $10,000. But there are three days left of the drive, and I know you all have some greatness left in you. Here's the deal: Of the 19 blogs participating in this drive, only Pharyngula reached its challenge goal. This would be no big deal if we were just concerned with interblog bragging rights. But, there's more at stake here: the good people at DonorsChoose are…

Practical advice: irreproducibility.

I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can't tell you how happy I am that they're even including ethics training in this program. Anyway, one of the students asked a really good question, which I thought I'd share: Let's say you discover that a published result is irreproducible. Who do you tell? My answer after the jump. First, of course you want to make sure you've done all the things…

News from Pledge Central.

I swear I'm putting up a couple posts today that have nothing to do with the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to fund science and math classrooms. However, there have been some developments since the last update, and I thought you ought to know about them. Although PZ Myers and his minions met the goal of the Pharyngula challenge days ago, it shambles on like a zombie, now at more than 250% of the challenge goal. Way to go, unholy army of the undead! ScienceBlogs readers have so far donated $10,307.86 to the drive. Among other things, this means we've secured the entire $10,000 that SEED…

Friday Sprog Blogging: the world in a fig tree.

Last weekend, the Free-Ride family sat down to watch a nature program together: Nature: The Queen of Trees. The program looked at the variety of life around a giant fig tree. The central "relationship" in the program was between the tree and a wasp. From the program description: The wasp and the fig depend on each other for survival. Without the wasp, the tree could not pollinate its flowers and produce seeds. Without the fig, the wasp would have nowhere to lay its eggs. The younger Free-Riders were more captivated, however, by some of the secondary characters in the drama. Younger…

Martians, Revisited

Only when it comes to alien life forms can the absence of decent data - the 1976 Viking mission did not not detect any organic molecules - seem so exciting. Here's Sharon Begley, from behind the WSJ firewall: When scientists announced Monday that the search for life on Mars 30 years ago may not have been quite the bust it has long been portrayed, it didn't mean that the mission had missed any microorganisms, let alone advanced life forms. But it did underline the growing sense that decades of assumptions about extraterrestrial life need serious re-examination. In 1976, scientists studying…

The Limits of Science Redux

My original post on the (possible) limits of science generated lots of thought-provoking feedback. On the one hand, some people argued that I was conflating the persistence of statistical uncertainty with genuine mystery: Of course, there are built in uncertianties in science especially with the study of those messy organic things. However, this doesn't mean that we won't be able to trim those uncertianties till they are so miniscule as to be meaningless. Others accused me of the opposite mistake. They said I forgot that "we don't know what we don't know": Dawkins says science can make God…

9/11

I have had the tragic privilege of living in New York during 9/11 and London during 7/7. The two events are, of course, incomparable, if only because the falling skyscrapers puncutated our lives without warning. I still vividly remember the first night of 9/11, when the stench of melted plastic seeped uptown, and the thousands of dead were still smoldering, and the skyline had been broken. There was still smoke in the air, and the sick smell of it had taken care of my hunger. We knew that everything had changed. We were right. History pivoted with the hi-jacked planes. The wars that began on…

Kandel on Psychotherapy

I've written before about the the failure of basic neuroscience research to advance neuropharmacology (at least, it's been a failure so far), but it's nice to see Eric Kandel, my old mentor (and one of my scientific heroes), make the same argument. Kandel began his scientific career as a Freudian psychiatrist - he was soon turned off by the blatant the lack of empiricism - so his recent interest in the biological benefits of talk therapy, and ways of rigorously measuring those benefits, provides an interesting snapshot on the state of neuroscience. On the one hand, it's sobering that talk…

Football

Is it football season already? It seems like I just got over the epic disappointment of the Superbowl. (Yes, I'm a Pats fan) So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to affect the sport over the last few decades: the ascent of the passing game. Since 1960, quarterbacks have managed to increase their average gain per pass attempt by nearly 30 percent, from 4.6 yards to 6.5 yards. (Running backs only get about 4 yards per attempt, a number that hasn't changed in thirty years.) Furthermore, even as quarterbacks have gotten more yards per pass, they…

Baseball, Meth and Road Games

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this: Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered planes and fancy hotels probably help.) A 1986 analysis of nearly 3,500 Premier League English professional soccer games found that the distance traveled had no effect on home-field advantage. A study in 1992 of professional baseball and hockey teams concluded that "travel factors" accounted for less than 1.5 percent of the variance in the home advantage. A…

I am really tired of Paul the Psychic Octopus

I know you all mean well, but 30-40 emails a day just about the German octopus 'predicting' World Cup matches is wearing me out. I have to explain a few things. Cephalopods are not psychic. Nothing is. If this were real, it would be Paul the Precognitive Octopus. It's telling the future, not reading minds. Cephalopods cannot see into the future. Nothing can. As this game is set up, there's a simple 50% chance in any trial that the octopus will guess correctly. It has guessed correctly 6 times; there's a 1 in 64 chance you could get the same result flipping a quarter. Cephalopods are smart and…

Holding Your Breath

Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney: The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in Brooklyn and at age 11 managed to hold his breath for three and a half minutes. In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the…

Jeff Tweedy on Migraines

The NY Times group blog on Migraines just posted a really fantastic article by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (one of my favorite bands), on his chronic migraine condition: There are a lot of different ways migraines have affected my music, and vice versa: being a musician has allowed me -- for lack of a better phrase -- to rise above the pain from time to time. I've never missed a show because of a migraine. But I've played some really horrible shows and cut them short because there was very little I could do to keep going. I've played shows where I had bucket on the side of the stage where I…

Math and the Brain

Jim Holt has a great article on the strange neural anatomy of mathematics in the new New Yorker: One morning in September, 1989, a forme sales representative in his mid-fortie entered an examination room with Stanisla Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris Three years earlier, the man, whom researcher came to refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brai hemorrhage that left him with an enormous lesion in the rear half of his lef hemisphere. He suffered from severe handicaps: his right arm was in a sling; h couldn't read; and his speech was painfully slow. He had once been married,…

Snow and Inuit Vocabulary

Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This post was originally going to be about how I now understand why the Inuit language has split "snow" into so many different and specific nouns: there really are that many different types of snow. (Keep in mind that I'm a native Southern Californian, so I thought snow was something they manufactured on cold days for ski slopes.) But then I discovered this…

The Divorce Myth

There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Last week, the newspapers were filled with stories about rising divorce rates. It was widely reported that couples that married in the 1970's had a less than even chance of celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. But those statistics were misleading. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers report: The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those…

Evolution and trustworthiness

Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access): Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation-selection balance, spatio-temporal fluctuations in selection, frequency dependence and good-genes mate choice are invoked to explain heritable personality variation, yet for continuous behavioural traits, it remains unclear which selective force is likely to maintain distinct…

Signs pointing towards eruption at Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira

Goma after the 2002 Eruption of Nyiragongo The activity at Redoubt has captivated a lot of us, but in the grand scheme of things, its eruption are more likely to caused inconvenience and property damage rather than dramatically loss of life (unless something huge and unexpected occurs). However, the same cannot be said if Nyiragongo and/or Nyamuragira (a.k.a. Nyamulagira) in the Congo were to erupt. These volcanoes are close to the city of Goma, a city of nearly 600,000, not including refugees from the fighting in the region. Eruptions of Nyiragongo in 2002 prompted the displacement of 400,…

The Price Equation

In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land: A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found set out was not any sort of new derivation or correction of my 'kin selection' but rather a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection. Central to Price's approach was a covariance formula the like of which I had never seen...Price had not like the rest of us looked up the work of the pioneers when he first became interested in selection;…

Patterns of response rates on OkCupid by sex & race

In the OkCupid post on response rates and race & sex there are two charts which show how males and females respond to inquiries of the opposite sex by race. So, you can see that black women on OkCupid respond positively to men in general, while women respond positively in particular to white men. In fact for many racial minorities women respond more positively to inquiries from white men than they do co-racialists (the same is not true of men). I suspect some of this has to do with the excess of men on OkCupid, combined with selection effects in terms of who joins OkCupid. OkCupid is…

Liberal distrust of the scientific consensus

Yesterday in my review of the recent Pew survey comparing attitudes of scientists and the general public I emphasized the fact that scientists are disproportionately godless liberals. But there are some issues where it seems that the Left is on the forefront of science-skepticism. There has been talk here on ScienceBlogs about the disproportionate Lefty orientation of anti-vaccination activists. From what I can tell this is true, but anti-vaccination sentiment is too shallow of a sentiment for it be starkly political, at least according to these data (there's little party difference). On the…

Iraq is really conservative

Back before the Iraq War invasion there was some talk about the human and cultural capital of the nation. That it was the Germany of the Middle East. That it was in a good position to benefit from liberation. There was some theorizing that Iraq could be a linchpin of a new geopolitical axis which was friendly to the United States and Israel. Much of this was pushed by Ahmad Chalabi, but there were a host of others who made such arguments because they wanted the invasion for their own reason. In any case, it didn't work out. That's obvious. But looking at the World Values Survey the past few…

A clarification

Responses to my challenge at the end of this article are trickling in, but so far, none of them are filling the bill. Let me explain what is not an appropriate reply: Cackling that Coulter must be right because she's got "liberal panties in a twist" is not cogent. Telling me that the "WHOLE BOOK PROVES LIBERALS ARE THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICA" is not cogent. Promising to pray for me, or assuring me that I will burn in hell, is not cogent. Explicit details about how Ann Coulter is sexier than "fat harry hippie jew girls" is not cogent. Here's the simple summary. Ann Coulter has written this…

Yeah, we've got insane people prowling the Midwest

The FBI is cracking down on a Christian militia group that has been threatening to assassinate police officers and overthrow the government. There are nuts like this scattered all over the place; they collect guns, dress up in military gear, and play war games in the woods. They have no chance of succeeding in their aims, but are so delusional the believe they are the vanguard of a coming revolution. Why? Because God tells them so. These fanatics are typically deeply immersed in Christian End Times mythology. Read their statement about their aims. They are "Preparing for the end time battles…

Adoptive parents invest more, get fewer returns

Via Dienekes, Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children: Stepchildren are abused, neglected and murdered at higher rates than those who live with two genetically related parents. Daly and Wilson used kin selection theory to explain this finding and labeled the phenomenon "discriminative parental solicitude." I examined discriminative parental solicitude in American households composed of both genetic and unrelated adopted children. In these families, kin selection predicts parents should favor their genetic children over adoptees. Rather than looking…

Read Andrew Gelman, not Politico

Politico is the pleasure of the pundit-class. That being said, Andrew Gelman's site makes it rather clear that Politico is also US Weekly for politicians. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but their fixation on epiphenomenal froth should really have "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer. I'm picking on Politico because I don't want to crucify Howard Fineman again lest the dead shall rise to rebuke my abuse. This post is prompted by Andrew's post, A Democratic swing, not an Obama swing: I think Charlie Cook was closer to the mark when he wrote, "The political environment and…

The race-mixing Vice President

Over the past few months I've been reading books on American history seeing that I am American and I should know a bit about the country which I call home. For example, right now I'm reading Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877. I was surprised when I stumbled upon Richard Mentor Johnson, the 9th Vice President of the United States, between 1836 and 1840: Following the war, Johnson returned to the House of Representatives, and was elevated to the Senate in 1819 to fill the seat vacated by John J. Crittenden, who resigned to become Attorney General. As his constituency…

Day-Age creationism is almost as goofy as Young Earth creationism

One of the most common strategems for reconciling evolution and the Bible that I've run into is the Day-Age hypothesis, the claim that each of the seven 'days' of the book of Genesis represents one of God's days, which doesn't have to be 24 hours long, but could be millions or billions of years instead. All you have to do is stretch the timescale of Genesis to fit the geological timescale, and voilà, it's a perfect metaphorical description of the very same processes science has described. Why, those old Hebrews couldn't have known all that geology and astronomy, therefore they must have…

Evolution and homosexuality

Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis: Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection--she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that…

DemFromCT's interview with us at DailyKos

On Sunday my friend and colleague from Fluwiki, DemFromCT, did me the honor of interviewing me on the front page of DailyKos. That's a pretty tall platform, being the most visited blog in the known universe (and beyond), so it's best to be absolutely clear when saying things there. I"m not sure I quite met that standard, but I'll let you judge for yourself, as I am cross-posting the interview below the fold. But this also gives me an opportunity to clarify one point that drew some justified comment. Here's something I said in the interview: In the past I downplayed individual prepping for a…

What Creatures Do: Animal Behavior

Here is the next installment of my lecture notes for teh adult education speed-class in biology. As always, I ask for corrections and suggestions for improvement (May 20, 2006): -------------------------------------- BIO101 - Bora Zivkovic - Lecture 3 - Part 1 Imagine that you are a zebra, grazing in the savannah. Suddenly, you smell a lion. A moment later, you hear a lion approaching and, out of the corner of your eye, you see the lion running towards you. What happens next? You start running away, of course. How does that happen? Your brain receieved information from your sensory…

The Dinner Party

I was asked this by a friend recently, and it has been stuck in my head (even though the whole idea requires an egomaniacal suspension of disbelief) - "If you could sit down to dinner with the people you think see the world we're in most clearly and spend dinner working on how to change things and be ready for a crisis, who would you invite to eat with you?"  He added the caveat that I can have as many people as I want, and no, I don't have to cook and clean up ;-). Actually, if I were going to do this, I would love to host.  I like nothing better than to be the one doing the cooking,…

Baby on board--in a BSL4 lab

I'm happy to welcome Dr. Heather Lander to the blogosphere and Twitterverse. She's a virologist who has done work with some of the world's deadliest pathogens in a high-security biosafety level 4 laboratory. This is the type of lab where one must wear "space suits" to work with organisms. You've probably seen in dramatized in various movies and TV shows (such as The Walking Dead). Heather describes what it's really like to work in one--even while pregnant. Dr. Lander, 9 months pregnant in a BSL4 lab   TS: Can you tell readers a bit about your background and research? How did you get…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

As usual on Tuesday nights, lots of cool stuff got published on PLoS ONE today. Here are some of my picks, but you should check all 30 of them (so, this week I am correct - there are now 1000+ articles on PLoS ONE): Large-Scale Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of the Domestic Goat Reveals Six Haplogroups with High Diversity: Studying the genetic diversity of domesticated animals can provide insights into their domestication, and even the history of human migration. In this paper Pompanon and colleagues study mitochondrial DNA diversity of the domestic goat from 2430 animals from widespread Old…

Larry's Solo Act

Dave and Larry don't always perform together, of course. Larry has his own act, which can be seen at his blog pretty much every day. And he's continued to peddle nonsense on this issue over there. (1) The attorney fee awards that defendants must pay in establishment clause cases are often draconian. The Dover school board was soaked for $1 million in fees, though the board deserved little more than a slap on the wrist, if even that much. But as I keep saying, they only claim the government agency - and that's what a school is - got "soaked" or was "intimidated" by the ACLU when they disagree…

Dembski's Theodicy

I have written before that I regard the problem of evil as essentially a decisive refutation of Christianity. It's not quite logically impossible to reconcile an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God with the sheer quantity of evil and suffering in the world, but it's pretty close. So when William Dembski posted a 48-page essay entitled "Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science," I was intrigued. The word “theodicy,” pronounced to sound like a certain epic poem by Homer, generally refers to the problem of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil. The problem of…

Classic Edition: You Talkin' to Me?

This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I've re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there's enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post. Since posting this, I've given several more Public Lectures, and they're a lot of fun. I've also gotten a lot better at ad-libbing physics lectures with minimal notes, which may or may not be a Bad Thing. The text of my 2002 post is below the fold. Having been tiresomely political for the past few days…

What I Do When I'm Not Doing This Blog

From the department of self-promotion, let me call attention to the current volume of The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. If you click on the link and scroll down to P164, you will find a barn-burning, rhetorical masterpiece of a paper entitled, “Isoperimetric Numbers of Regular Graphs of High Degree With Applications to Arithmetic Riemann Surfaces.” And who wrote this paper, you ask, the suspense practically killing you? That would be my long time friend and collaborator Dominic Lanphier, of Western Kentucky University, along with yours truly. Yay! Always nice to have one more line…

A study of antineoplastons fails to be published. Stanislaw Burzynski's propagandist Eric Merola whines about it. News at 11.

Eric Merola alternates between offending me and making me laugh at his antics. Since it's been a couple weeks since I've written anything about the Houston doctor who claims to be able to do so much better against many forms of cancer than conventional medicine, I have to express a bit of gratitude to Mr. Merola for giving me today's topic for blogging. Mr. Merola, as you recall, produced two incredibly bad and deceptive movies lionizing that very same Houston cancer doctor as a brave maverick genius who's been kept down by The Man (i.e., the Texas Medical Board, the FDA, the National Cancer…

School vaccine mandates are against the Nuremberg Code?

About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement's greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation in particular, the reason being that it would make it just a little more difficult for parents to obtain philosophical exemptions from school mandates. Right now in California, parents basically just have to sign a form, no questions asked, no other…