Search Content

Displaying results 5901 - 5950 of 87947

Use Your Opposable Thumb to Make A Difference: Vote!

How can you resist doing as the Bard of the Internetz asks? She should be first on any list -- GrrlScientist! GrrlScientist! Let no one's vote be lost or miss'd -- GrrlScientist! GrrlScientist! Let one and all her cause assist -- Come join with me; I must insist! Just move your fingers, hands, and wrist -- GrrlScientist! GrrlScientist! Come raise your voice and clench your fist -- GrrlScientist! GrrlScientist! Come march, or strut, or do the twist -- GrrlScientist! GrrlScientist! Her cause is just; you can't resist; Don't let her lose, or I'll be pissed! (I'll stop for now -- you've got the…

Shores of Ancient Sweden

The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free. You can download detailed hi-res maps of your favourite parts of Sweden for 0-16 thousand years ago, and a few thousand years into the future! (But only at intervals of whole millennia.) Invaluable for Swedish prehistorians! Above is the area between LÃ¥ngbro and Hjortsberga in VÃ¥rdinge parish, Södermanland, where I'm planning some fieldwork, as it looked in 1000 BC according to current knowledge of the shoreline displacement process. I scouted the…

On-Line Mesopotamian Board Game

Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the site's thousands-strong ranking list. I can't really compare against other Knizia games, but I do know that it's one of my favourites. As you may imagine, I was very happy the other day when I discovered that Boardgamegeek.com actually offers on-line T&E for free, played against real people! The rules are available in many languages on BGG. Let's have…

Piffle on parade

Time is running an online poll to discover "the most influential people of the year" — I'd urge you all to vote for Dawkins, except that when you browse the list you discover it's a collection of pop stars, models, sports figures, and the sparse sprinkling of a few politicians and random others. It's a collection that will depress you with its triviality and banality. Imagine that aliens visited our planet and asked for a meeting with the most influential people on earth, the people most representative of our values, and we sent along a delegation containing Perez Hilton, Kate Moss, Brad Pitt…

Tobias Bondesson Makes and Shoots Finds

Tobias Bondesson has kindly sent me photographs of several interesting finds, taken during our recent fieldwork with the heavy dudes of the Gothenburg Historical Society. With his permission, I've inserted them into the relevant blog entries: Fieldwork in Hov and Vretakloster Fieldwork in Tingstad and Ãstra Husby Fieldwork in Kimstad and Kaga Tobias has also opened my eyes to Nordisk Detektorforum, an on-line discussion forum and image database for (mainly Danish) detectorists. These guys are responsible, keen and hugely knowledgeable. One user, for instance, identified a coin we found as…

Open Access Journal and E-text Repository for Archaeology

On-line Open Access "journals" and e-text repositories are very nice, but archaeology doesn't have any big or commonly used ones yet. This may be about to change with the Italian site Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology. At the moment, much of the site is in Italian. Full-text repository searches for the words "Mesolithic", "Mycenaean" and "Merovingian" didn't turn up any hits. "Bronze" scored four hits, "Iron" six. Worse, the material published in the Journal doesn't seem to have been entered into the repository, and I could find no PDF files, only texts hacked up into…

The Most Wanted Particle (Synopsis)

“Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston Yes, the Universe can be considered the ultimate innovator, taking the fundamental particles and forces of the Universe, and assembling them into the entirety of what we know, interact with and observe today. Illustration credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss. But what is it all made out of, at a fundamental level? And how did we figure it all out? ATLAS physicist and University College London professor Jon Butterworth is all set to give a free public lecture (live-streamed, online) tomorrow,…

I'm rated WHAT??!?

Some people were annoyed that I included a link yesterday that led to a silly story that used strippers as an example of good marketing, that also included a photo of a woman in lingerie. It was very mild stuff, and I'm not going to apologize for that; the worst thing at the link was the sexism, and I will say that I do not endorse that at all. Sometimes I will talk about sex here, and although I'm not going to start sprinkling the articles with coarse and exploitive porn, I'm also not going to be shy about the frank talk. Then Cocktail Party Physics had to ruin my self-image as an unabashed…

Don't mess with Tex ...

... tbooks. (get it?) Josh Rosenau, of the National Center for Science Education, has a piece in Seed online: The National Center for Science Education, in Oakland, CA, where I work, has tracked hundreds of attacks on evolution education in 48 states in the last five years. In the last two years alone, 18 bills in 10 states have targeted the teaching of evolution. These bills, like the flawed science standards approved by the Texas Board of Education in March, don't ban evolution outright. But they do authorize teachers to omit evolution or include creationism at their whim. "These bills…

Best. Crossword. Ever.

Be sure to have a look at the crossword puzzle in today's New York Times. It's the bestest, most awesomest crossword ever! Actually, I haven't seen it yet. The Times does not make their crosswords freely available online (is there no end to their treachery?). And it's not so easy to find a print edition of the Times here in Western Virginia. The university library gets it, but some days, like today apparently, they are a little slow getting the paper down to the periodicals room. The way I know it is such a supremely magnificent puzzle is that it was constructed by my cousin Barry. So…

Last Stand of the Orang Utan?

The Guardian is reporting that the Orang Utan "could be virtually extinct within five years after it was discovered that the animal's rainforest habitat is being destroyed even more rapidly than had been predicted." The UN's environment programme report, 'The Last Stand of the Orang Utan: State of Emergency', says natural rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being cleared so rapidly that up to 98 per cent may be destroyed by 2022, and the lowland forest strongholds of orang utans much sooner, unless urgent action is taken. This is a full decade earlier than the previous report estimated…

On Stem Cell Bill, The Weekly Standard Argues That Research Claims Are Hyped; New Studies Show "Middle Way" Compromise

As I predicted last week in my column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, opponents of the House stem cell bill are arguing that science advocates have hyped both the promise and the public demand for research, while recent studies show a "middle way" compromise where funding for new embryonic stem cell lines is not needed. Consider, for example, this column by Yuval Levin at the Weekly Standard. Meanwhile, the Bush White House, in a 67 page report strategically framed as "Advancing Stem Cell Science Without Destroying Human Life," argues that the latest adult stem cell studies make embryonic…

All Things E. coli

E. coli is, arguably, the one species that scientists know best. If you type the name "Escherichia coli" into PubMed, the database of the National Library of Medicine, you'll get over a quarter of a million titles of scientific papers. Scientists have sequenced about 30 genomes of different strains of E. coli. It's the microbe of choice for those who want to figure out how to tinker with life. There's one problem with all this attention--how are scientists supposed to make sense of all this data? Scientists have created sites to aggregate E. coli data in one place. The newest and broadest…

Catnip for dogs?

A reader asked if there was an herb equivalent to catnip for dogs. In my search for the answer to that question, I came across many articles claiming that although some dogs will actually respond to catnip, aniseed is to dogs what catnip is to cats. Foxhounds will reportedly follow the scent of anise oil in drag hunting and the artificial rabbit that greyhound dogs chase during racing is laced with anise oil. Although I could not find a peer-reviewed source of information on this topic, there are many anise-flavored doggy treat recipes and products online, which apparently freshen their…

Blair v. Hitchens poll

Tonight, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate on whether religion is a force for good. I'd love to hear Hitchens on that subject, but Blair? That's almost as comical as having Hitchens debate Bush on the subject. The newspapers are relying on two tools to promote the event. Hype: Together, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens are two of the great British thinkers on religion. Wait, Blair…isn't he the simpering me-too former prime minister who was our American lackey in the UK? The one who converted to Catholicism, an act that clearly marks him as mentally deficient? Hmmm. Oh, well…

Speaking Science 2.0, Complete (and Replete) With Slides

On June 4, more than 120 people turned out for the Mooney/Nisbet Speaking Science 2.0 talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. The talk is now part of their online content, including an E-briefing summary along with the powerpoint slides synchronized with audio of our presentation. With this tool you can listen to the entire talk or scroll through the labeled sections and slides based on topic. NYAS has allowed free access to this member content by way of the following link. And so now I will again challenge those who criticized some of the original "framing science" ideas to engage with…

Casual Fridays -- what makes a great resume?

There's a lot of advice online about what makes a good resume, and in these tough economic times, getting a job is tougher than ever. So this week, I thought we'd test some different resumes and see which factors are most important in picking a good candidate. You'll be asked to read two resumes very carefully, then answer a few questions evaluating each candidate. I've changed just a few items on each resume, so make sure you read them closely. Then next week we'll see which factors matter the most. Click here to participate As usual, the study has just a few questions, and should only take…

Rumsfeld es un Pendejo

Donald Rumsfeld href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6930197.stm">revealed the identity of the star witness in the Abu Grhaib case.  The guy who blew the whistle had been promised anonymity. In 2004, the Bush Administration href="http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/07/bush-admin-may-be-responsible-for.html">blew a Pakistani intelligence operation by revealing sensitive intelligence information. In 2005, there was the Libby-Plame Leak. In April 2006, the Bush Administration blew rel="tag" href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2006/04/leaker-in-chief-reduxoffered-…

Portrait of a Reviewer as a Young Man

Science is dynamic. Sometimes this means that science is wrong, sometimes it means that science is messy. Mostly it is very self-correcting, given the current state of knowledge. At any given time the body of science knows a lot, but could be overturned when new evidence comes in. What we produce through all of this, however, at the end of the day, are polished journal articles. Polished journal articles. Every time I think about this disparity, I wonder why different versions of a paper, the referee reports, the author responses, and all editorial reviews aren't part of the scientific…

Why you should let a physicist curate your art show

What do you get when you ask Harvard physicist Lisa Randall to curate an art show? A Los Angeles gallery found out, and Wired has the story. My favorite quote: I asked Mays whether the artists gained an appreciation for physics. "Oh god, yes!" he said. "I've seen them carrying books around about different scientific theories." No! Not artists with books of scientific theories! The world is upside-down! Coverage of the Measure for Measure exhibition is here - it sadly closed last weekend, but there are photos online, and I tracked down a few of the sciart contributors, Meeson Pae Yang (with an…

Would anyone be interested in a Pharyngula chat room?

So I got some email a while back about this free and easy to use web-based chat room service…and heck, it's so simple I thought I'd give it a whirl. Here's a link to a Pharyngula chat room—try it out and let me know how it goes. I'll plan on checking in myself now and then, but don't wait up for me, talk among yourselves. I will definitely plan on popping in at 8pm Central time tonight (Friday), if you really want to yell at me online. We'll see how it goes; I don't know how well it will hold up if ten people are trying to converse at once, and I also notice that there doesn't seem to be any…

Stop it. Just stop it.

OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it's an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you're going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It's like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too. Behold: His Holy Space. It's like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look…

Trust and Critical Thinking at Science Online 10

Science Online 10, or as I like to call it, S0t0, is shaping up to be quite the un-conference. Stephanie Zvan has organized a session called Trust and Critical Thinking, with herself PZ Myers, my favorite Radio Talk Show Host Desiree Schell, and Kirsten "Dr. Kiki" Sanford. Oh, and me. Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we…

Singularity Institute Research Challenge

The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details: ...the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI's 2010 activities. Starting this campaign, we've put more details of our ongoing and potential work online than ever before, so you can…

Fear of the godless

That's what it all boils down to, isn't it? People are afraid of reason, because they know it erodes faith—better to foster ignorance than risk encouraging people to think. Brian Flemming, of The God Who Wasn't There, links to an interesting account of what happened when an 'open-minded' church offered to screen his movie: they only showed two clips and bracketed them with lots of apologetic padding. I think they know what would happen if they let that bomb go off in the minds of their faithful congregants. This stuff is going to get out there, though. Dawkins' series, The Root of All Evil?…

E. coli Evolution Follow-up

I'm back at last from the west coast leg of the Microcosm tour. Portland had a cloudy, melancholy charm, and at Powell's I gave a reading in front of a collection of hand-made black velvet paintings from the nearby Velveteria. When the audience's eyes drifted off of me, I couldn't tell if they were lost in thought or distracted by Jimi Hendrix or a smoking clown. The next day I headed for San Francisco, where I talked to Moira Gunn for her show Tech Nation (link to come). Then I had lunch with Kirsten Sanford, who will be interviewing me on tomorrow's edition of This Week In Science. Then…

Chemical Valley: Who is protecting the residents?

by Ken Ward, Jr., cross-posted from Sustained Outrage: A Gazette Watchdog blog Last August, Kanawha Valley residents lived through the spectacle of their public safety officials practically begging the folks who run the Bayer CropScience chemical plant to tell them what was on fire, and what toxic chemicals residents nearby were being exposed to. Remember the exchange between Metro 911 officials and the plant? âWell, I canât give out any information, like I say, weâll contact you with the, with the proper information,â a plant gate worker who identified himself only as Steve told a 911…

Real Guys Immunize

Last week I went to Philadelphia to a very interesting meeting - a Social Media Summit on Immunization. Sponsored by Immunization Action Coalition, this was a second annual meeting for health-care non-profits, organized (amazingly well, with great attention to detail) by Lisa Randall (and, I am sure, a small army of helpers). Over a day and a half of the meeting there were two simultaneous sessions at each time slot, but I did not have much opportunity to ponder my choices as I was at the front of the room at three sessions, and participated actively in several others. The style was very '…

The Pseudonymity Laboratory: When Authors and Bloggers Collide

Is snarky honest real-time discussion of a paper's conclusions more constructive to the authors and the larger scientific enterprise than formal, reserved, and staid holding forth in the correspondence section of a classic clinical journal? Fact is that this discussion will be over even before the next issue of the journal comes out. A really interesting interplay has been ongoing across the sci/med blogosphere following a commentary last Wednesday by Dr Isis on a NEJM correspondence, entitled, "Shifts to and from Daylight Saving Time and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction." (free full text…

Book Review: A History of Paleontology Illustration

When I wrote my essay on violent interactions between prehistoric monsters in art, I thought I had touched on something intriguing. I penned a proposal for a more focused article on the topic and sent it out to magazines purported to feature articles at the intersection of science and culture. The response I got was almost uniformly the same. Not only were the magazines not interested in dinosaurs, but illustrations of dinosaurs were not art. As M.J.T. Mitchell explained in his interesting (yet deeply flawed) The Last Dinosaur Book, illustrations of prehistoric animals are often seen as "…

Societies and science

John Dupuis asks some provocative questions; I thought I'd take a stab at answering them, and I encourage fellow SciBlings to do likewise. I quite agree with John when he says that the ferment over publishing models disguises a larger question, "the role of scholarly and professional societies in a changing publishing and social networking landscape." My own history with professional societies, I think, bears this out nicely. John asks first: What societies do you belong to? I belong to the American Society for Information Science and Technology. I was a member of the American Library…

The best of 2007, or Orac indulges his inner critic wannabe

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I'm a bit of a music critic wannabe. This pretension began very early in the history of this blog and persisted every year. Usually, sometime around the end of the year or the first day of the new year, I'll compile my list of my favorite CDs of the year. I had planned on doing this for 2007 yesterday, on the last day of the year, but somehow I didn't manage to do it. So, what the heck? Before I get back to the usual medical and scientific topics of this blog tomorrow, I can't resist indulging my college age pretension once again. A word about my…

Why Do Republicans Like Cracked in the Head Candidates?

When Senator George "Macacawitz" Allen of Virginia was still considered a viable presidential candidate, I asked this question: Can we please have presidential candidates who are not psychological basketcases? ... Is it possible for the Republicans to nominate someone who is not cracked in the head? Please? Just in case. If the support for Giuliani is any indication, the answer is definite "no": First way: Rudy genuinely doesn't realize that taking a phone call in the middle of a speech is rude. But this suggests a lack of emotional intelligence so stunning that even I don't think Rudy is…

Some Sunday Links

Happy Belated Evacuation Day! Here are some links for you. The sciency stuff: There's been some interest in a guy named Michael Egnor who said some silly things about evolution. The Mad Biologist chimed in too. Afarensis used Egnor's IDiocy to have a very nice discussion about tooth decay. Octopus eyes: learn all about 'em. RPM discusses a new phylogenetics term: the clan. Are drug prices too high? ScienceBlogling Abel Pharmboy wonders what we can do about that. Revere defends open-access publishing. Here's a neat post about Soay sheep, one of the cooler ecological model systems out…

We Need Journalists, but Not These Journalists: The Bartiromo-Medicare Edition

I'll have more to say about the first part of the post header tomorrow (hopefully), but this exchange between Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, a proponent of a Medicare-for-All public option, and CNBC reporter Maria Bartiromo is mind-boggling: At one point, Bartiromo was critical of the government-managed health care system in the United Kingdom. "How do I know the quality [of health care in the United States] is not going to suffer" with a public option? she asked. Rep. Weiner reminded her that there already is government-managed health care in the United States -- namely, Medicare,…

Action Alert: HR 669 Fact Sheet

tags: HR669, pets, exotic animals, invasive species, politics [larger view] Feel free to download, email, print and distribute or post this fact sheet among your friends, colleagues, and the pet stores that you patronize. The text of this poster states: HR 669 prohibits what YOU can do with your pet bird (or other exotic animals). You may NOT take your pet bird (or other exotic animals) if you move to another state [Section 6(a)(2)] or country [Section 6(a)(1)] You may NOT travel across state lines on vacation with your pet bird (or other exotic animals) [Section 6(a)(2)] NOTE:…

"Reefer blindness"

The US public just doesn't get this terrorist threat business, according to John P. Wlaters, the President's drug czar: The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment. John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. Walters made the comments at a Thursday press…

Science---the only way to view reality

Science is the investigation of reality. Reality is, by definition, everything. It is all we can see, all we can measure. It is, for all practical purposes, a god; it is omnipresent, omnipotent. The only tool that successfully measures and describes reality is science (including mathematics). So why the desire to placate theologians and theocrats in scientific discussions? What can religion offer the exploration of reality? The only thing it has to offer is a potentially consistent moral code; and that isn't unique to religion. Religion can offer beauty, song, art, poetry, fellowship…

I was right!

People with good reasoning skills don't fall for stupid things like spun arguments and advertising. I always suspected that if we taught a basic reasoning class in public schools in which kids were taught about logic and critical thinking it might lead to a decrease in the efficacy of advertisement. Reasoning abilities are influenced by intelligence and socioeconomic status, but they are also skills that can be learned and honed with practice, says a "decision scientist" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Many people are affected by the way that information is framed, marketed or…

Next Science Cafe Raleigh: Think Globally - Eat Locally

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898 Think Globally - Eat Locally How much do you know about the food you eat? Were pesticides applied? Do you know where it was grown and how far it traveled to get to you? How much did its transportation contribute to global warming? What can we do to bring about the revival of locally produced foods and all the benefits they bring - better taste, nutrition, stronger local economies and relationships with local farmers, reduced…

open access at Harvard

Will Harvard junior faculty publish first author Nature papers now? I have to confess that with the experience of arXiv.org I am continually bemused by the fervour over open access in the rest of academia. Now, I gather, Harvard has passed a faculty resolution mandating open access for all faculty scholarly publications - with faculty being asked to deposit PDF files with the library which will provide open access (I hope they are sensible and buy the arXiv archiving tools). So what? In astronomy, physics and math this is a non-issue, since essentially all journals that matter grant arxiv.org…

InCROIable conference coverage!

Scientific conferences are so cool :-D It s bunch of really smart people getting together to pow-wow about a common interest, sharing their newest data, brainstorming new ideas, trouble-shooting, arguing, finding new collaborators-- its just so friggen cool :-D Unfortunately, us smaller labs can only budget for one/a couple of these a year, so I am missing out on the 2011 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections :( Its also kind of a downer that Average Joes/Janes arent really allowed to come, not that most people could take a week off work to attend anyway. Lucky for us…

Make the Hugos Better

Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it's time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it's mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides. It's worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution to the problem: the Hugo Awards are voted on by fans. This means that they tend to skew to the middlebrow, true, but it also means that they can be fixed, in a way that, say, the Oscars really can't. If you don't like the stuff that gets nominated for the Hugos, buy…

Links for 2009-12-12

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border Boing Boing With information on how to donate to his legal defense. (tags: canada sf law blogs crime US stupid) The Good and Bad of the New Hubble Image : Starts With A Bang Earlier this week, I showcased the newly-released Hubble Ultra Deep Field in the infrared, and compared it with the older image of the same region taken in visible light. As many astute readers noticed, the newer image looks blurrier than the old one! This is true, and there's a good reason for this. (tags: science astronomy galaxies…

Death by chocolate

If you've been following the wars in Africa, you already know that there's at least one other powderkeg besides Libya — Côte d'Ivoire, which is struggling with a disputed succession and roving gangs of angry young men with guns. The Nation has an excellent summary of the problems in Côte d'Ivoire, and unfortunately it's all about chocolate. Also unfortunately, although American bombs have been involved in the Libyan conflict, Côte d'Ivoire has also been afflicted with American intervention — in this case, by the corporate power of agribusiness, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). At the…

Back again (from Africa no less) - and apologies for the absence.

Just saw the tally on the blog, and it seems that the last time I wrote here was well over two months ago. Well, most of that has to do with a trip to Ibadan, Nigeria, and an extended bout with jet lag, but I'm back into the blogging mood again. To start with, I thought I'd have a hand at a Harper's Index type post, detailing some of the things I saw and discovered at my trip. Also take a gander at some of photos I took below. - - - Some points to consider. Topic of workshop delivered by author of post (and his colleague Joanne Fox) - Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics; Number of…

Kellermann's case-control study on gun ownership and homicide

Edgar Suter writes: Dr. Kellermann's subsequent research "finding" that a gun in the home increases risk used a method that cannot distinguish between "cause" and "effect." Kellermann's illogical conclusion would be like finding more insulin in the homes of diabetics and so concluding that insulin "causes" diabetes. Interestingly Kellermann's own data show that when a homeowner is killed only rarely is the "gun in the home" the instrument of the homeowner's death. Untrue. See table 1 of the paper. How then can the gun "cause" the death? Does the gun magnetize murderers to the homeowner's…

The PharmacoScientific Creation of Well-Being

Neuroskeptic offers an elegant unpeeling of a study seeming specifically designed to find a marketing-friendly distinction for a drug -- Abilify -- otherwise undistinguished. Suppose you were a drug company, and you've invented a new drug. It's OK, but it's no better than the competition. How do you convince people to buy it? You need a selling point - something that sets your product apart. Fortunately, with drugs, you have plenty of options. You could look into the pharmacology - the chemistry of how your drug works in the body - and find something unique there. Then, all you need to do is…

Skepticards for the hopeful godless

Those fine folks behind Skepticon are already planning ahead to the next event, and have begun fundraising so they can keep the convention cheap to attend. They are smart people. However, the way they're trying to raise a little cash now is by selling Valentine's Day cards. Don't they know that godless skeptics are heartless, cold, unfeeling people who don't know what love is? Anyway, if you choose to buy some for amusement — you know, so you can aloofly ponder in a detached, intellectual way the strange rituals of these emotional hu-mans — you know where to go. You can put custom messages in…

An ethical dilemma!

It's hard not to crack a cheerful smile at this story, but do try to take it seriously. A coven of Westboro Baptist anti-gay kooks went off to protest outside a soldier's funeral in Oklahoma, and returned to their car to find their tires slashed. When they drove into town on the flat tires anyway, to try and get them repaired, they were refused any help at all. There's a grim part of me that feels a kind of satisfaction at that, I'll admit. But I think it was wrong. Don't harm the WBC cretins no matter how awfully they prance. Do not vandalize their possessions. Don't even threaten them. Even…