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Blocked by Conservapedia

Following an idea that occurred to me while being interviewed for an article on the Conservapedia, I tried replacing the inadequate page on the ACLU with the comprehensive Wikipedia entry. Before I had a chance to create an entry for Christianity by the same means, my account was blocked. Alas, the Conservapedia does not yet have an entry for Christianity at all. Perhaps someone could help out. So much for my plan to replace the illustration of the Jesus entry with this one. The experiment, of course, would have been to see how long the information from a supposedly liberal Wikipedia entry…

Kline's parting shot

Having been demoted to a county district attorney in no small part because of his panty-sniffing obsession with patient records from family planning clinics, Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has decided that one of his final official acts will be charging Dr. George Tiller with 30 misdemeanor charges. The allegations involve whether Tiller properly filed forms explaining the reasons why women needed abortions in the third trimester. Kansas law allows third trimester abortions only if the woman faces injury to a "major bodily function." Tiller's attorney denies any wrongdoing, and says…

Help the Goodyear Strikers

Workers at a Topeka Goodyear plant have been part of a national strike by the United Steelworkers, seeking retirement security and job safety. You can sign a petition to support the workers as the strike heads into the holidays. And given that 16,000 USW workers nationwide are going to be on strike through the holidays, now is a good time to help them out. Every penny donated to the strike fund will go to striking workers. Three years ago, the USW's workers and retirees gave Goodyear big concessions to keep the company out of bankruptcy. Now the company has healthy margins and executives…

Look away

Via the inimitable Billmon, we learn that Torture reaches new depths in Iraq: Torture in Iraq is reportedly worse now than it was under deposed president Saddam Hussein, the United Nations' chief anti-torture expert said Thursday. Manfred Nowak described a situation where militias, insurgent groups, government forces and others disregard rules on the humane treatment of prisoners. "What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," said Nowak, the global body's special investigator on torture. Horrors. Disregarding rules on the…

Photo of the Day #72: Pygmy Marmoset

The Pygmy Marmoset (Callithrix (Cebuella) pygmaea) is an interesting little primate. While it is often said on documentaries or zoo enclosure descriptions that they are among the most "primitive" of primates, marmosets actually have a number of derived features. On their hands, for instance, they have claws called tegulae instead of flattened nails. At first this would seem to be a characteristic that was retained from their ancestors, but tegulae are actually modified nails, meaning that the marmosets evolved claws in something of an evolutionary reversal. Likewise, marmosets often give…

Photo of the Day #67: Orangutan

If you see an Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) at a zoo, they'll probably be carrying around a large piece of cardboard or a blanket like the one from the Philadelphia Zoo pictured above. The reason for this seems to be that orangs normally live in a forested, enclosed habitat and prefer to have something over their heads, and if there are no trees they'll work with what they have. Chimpanzees, too, like to have cover over their heads in the wild and largely fear open spaces like savannas, the population at Mt. Assirik in Senegal being an exception as they move in large mixed-sex groups over the…

Photo of the Day #47: Gibbon Skull

Like many of the other photographs I've posted over the last week, this one also comes from the Primate Hall of the AMNH, this skeleton belonging to a gibbon (Family Hylobatidae). Gibbons are often called the "lesser apes" (they are not included in the Family Hominidae, which includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, and extinct relatives), but they are among the most charming of all primates, at least in my opinion. What you might notice in the skull, however, is the size of the canines, a feature that might be unexpected in a monogamous animal. Enlarged canines are…

The 12 RePosts of Christmas

Haiku: The daylight grows short Blogging time is scarce for now Repost is now here I am ready. Bring on the comments about the proper way to write a haiku. Of course, I should warn you that I am technically a professional Haikuer - here is my winning entry to ThinkGeek's haiku contest Here is the deal. I am going to pick 12 posts from my old stuff and post 1 a day for 12 days (hopefully). Yes, technically, this is not the 12 days of Christmas. Also, I have some other stuff that I am working on, so don't worry - it is not ONLY reposts in the next twelve days. Anyway, I figure some of you…

Palin-spastic: Why does she hate animals?

In which I again attempt to reconstruct Sarah Palin's past positions, accounting for crustal movement. Here are a few reasons that Palin's friends may not vote for her: When asked to reveal something about Palin that no one knows, one woman offered, "She doesn't care for cats very much," and another chimed in, "Oh, yes, she's afraid of my cat." As Defenders of Wildlife points out, Palin has also encouraged the brutal and unsportsmanly slaughter of wolves. And she sued the federal government when the feds tried to step in and stop polar bears from going extinct. This adds up to a bit of a…

Kansas Republican Delegation not behind McCain

Among the many Republican congresscritters not backing McSame, Todd Tiahrt truly stands out. Tiahrt claims to represent the Wichita area, and his refusal to back his party's nominee probably doesn't mean he backs Obama. He may well think McCain is too nice to immigrants, or is insufficiently Bush-like, or perhaps he's looking for a candidate who shares his anti-mother sentiments. Then again, he's facing a tough challenge by Donald Betts, a popular black state senator who opposed the war early on. Perhaps Tiahrt doesn't want to make it too easy to draw the obvious analogy – Betts:Tiahrt::…

Name the creationist

Who wrote: A manifestly unsound system like that of Darwin exercises a much more powerful influence than the deepest speculations, just because of its “practicability.“ And so we have seen the idea of evolution develop itself till it spread from biology and geology to all spheres of thought and investigation, and, intoxicated by its success, exercised such a tyranny that any one who did not swear by it was to be looked upon as a simpleton. No, not Ben Stein in Expelled, nor Denyse O'Leary's latest crush. For extra credit: Why should modern IDolators be very worried about quotes like that?…

Do not buy the Canon Rebel 350D

I got my lovely Olympus C4040-Z in 2002, and got it second-hand. It works beautifully, and I've never needed to take it in for servicing. Olympus isn't paying me to say that, and I don't consider it terribly exceptional. I do find it surprising that Canon would say this about the camera which took the leaked photos of the new Harry Potter book: "From what we know, the device is one of the original Rebel cameras, probably a 350D, and given that they've been out for three years, it's likely the owner would have had it cleaned or repaired in that time." First, that Canon would volunteer to…

Briefly noted

Reposted because it amuses me. Right before Saddam Hussein's execution, I wrote: As my AP English teacher told us when we read Billy Budd by Herman Melville "A criminal is hanged, a man is hung." Yet another piece of 19th century arcana that the Bush administration has made necessary in the modern world. In other news, I'm currently packing furiously. I'll be scheduling some posts to go up over the next week or so, since I'll be driving west to Oakland, CA, and will have little or no internet access during the drive and probably until I actually find an apartment. Anyone with a nice,…

It's not just the Catholics, amen

The intersection of sex and religion can get very disturbing. But if you want really disturbing, forget Catholicism — that's just old school abuse of power and guilt and ugliness, given strength by sheer numbers. The really freaky stuff is in cults, like The Family International. Don't click on that link unless you want to get sucked into a vortex of insanity — it's about a sex cult that used what they called "Flirty Fishing", more commonly known as prostitution, to recruit followers to Jesus and to make money, among other things. I got that from a link to a blog by a phone sex worker, which…

Caring for Animals

I've gotten numerous emails about my recent post on animal rights - I called animal experimentation a "necessary evil" - but I think this note from a reader eloquently captures the ambivalence that many scientists feel: I have a child with insulin-dependent diabetes. I am constantly aware that every single advance keeping her not only alive, but so healthy that others never notice her condition, rests on the shoulders of thousands upon thousands of creatures. These animals have suffered, and these animals feel pain as much as we; many are almost unbearably intelligent and are emotionally...…

Pets Get a Political Voice

This is great news. As an animal lover, I can certainly see how the Humane Society has tremendous political potential. From the WSJ: For the first time in its 50-year history, the Humane Society is trying to elect candidates to Congress who support its animal-welfare agenda. After a series of mergers with other animal-welfare groups, the Humane Society counts 10 million Americans as members, an average of 23,000 in each of the 435 House districts. That's more than twice the membership of the National Rifle Association, which is considered one of the most effective single-issue campaign…

Studio 360

One of my favorite parts of this whole book publication process has been getting to meet the people behind the voices on NPR. I spend so much time tuned to my local public radio station that I feel this intimate conversational bond with the anchors and reporters on the air. So it was a special treat to get to meet Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360, which I listen to religiously. You can listen to an excerpt from our conversation this weekend on the show. We talk about Whitman and the body, Cezanne's blank spots and the possibility of unraveling the rainbow. (Even if you're sick of hearing…

Asian & African genomes....

Yes. This weblog is ostensibly about genetics. And yes, I've gotten a little obsessed about crunching election data. Honestly, I get a little bit like this every four years...I remember the '96 election and the primitive years of the internet even. I decided I might as well post on my fixation for a few days to get it out of my system. Be aware that you won't have to deal with any normative political arguments from me; I don't care enough about ought, or, more accurately I don't think you are really interested in my opinions about the Good Life and how to obtain it. In any case, since…

Statistics and religious trends

I have a piece up for The Guardian's new Comment is Free Belief site, The use and abuse of statistics - Prophecies of the extinction of religion, or its triumph, fall prey to the weaknesses of linear prediction. Implicit in my argument are these sorts of dynamics: Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity…

Getting with the times

I've retired my old profile picture, but I thought I'd give you a peek at the larger photo from which it was taken. That's me in biology class, my senior year of high school, doing stuff with slides and an alcohol burner and microorganisms. Some dedicated yearbook photographer took the picture (though it wasn't one of the candids that made it into the yearbook). But high school was a long time ago ... Mad props to Joe Claus, the photographer who took the new profile picture. (Indeed, Joe's skillz are such that the new shot might be about as fair a representation of everyday-me as the old…

Friday Flotsam: USGS/SI update and the plume from Rabaul

To the updates! Batu Tara volcano in Indonesia. The volcano is currently producing small ash plumes. I was distracted enough by trying to figure out a way to teach about Miller Indices that I plum forgot to post this week's USGS/SI Weekly Volcanic Activity Report. It was a fairly quiet week so you didn't miss much. Enjoy it at your leisure. Rabaul must be positioned on the globe in such a way that NASA's Aqua satellite always gets a good shot at it. The Earth Observatory posted a new image of the plume from Rabaul and it looks thicker and more ash-laden than the image posted a few weeks ago…

If a volcano erupts in the woods ...

Mount Pagan in the Mariana Islands erupting on April 15, 2009. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory. Up until fairly recently, a lot of volcanoes got away with erupting without anyone knowing the better. However, with all the "eyes in the sky" we have these days, even remote oceanic volcanoes get caught in the act of erupting. Case in point is this image (above) of Mt. Pagan in the Mariana Islands erupting. It was captured by the MODIS satellite yesterday and it shows a health ash plume emanating from the volcano. Pagan is an oceanic stratovolcano on the sparsely populated island of…

Redoubt Mini-update for 2/13/2009

We've now had three weeks of waiting for Redoubt, and all we have to show for it is steam, seismicity and lots and lots of press. As of today, Redoubt continues with the same: elevated seismicity, constant monitoring, think it will erupt. Current status from AVO: Redoubt Volcano has not erupted. Elevated seismicity is continuing, dominated by ongoing volcanic tremor and occasional small earthquakes. A storm system is moving across the Redoubt area at present, which will make for poor viewing conditions today. Associated winds are causing a small increase in seismic amplitudes on some seismic…

Yellowstone New Year's Eve Update

Yellowstone looks to be keeping everyone on their toes as we ring in 2009. The earthquake swarm reported earlier this week is continuing, with multiple events between 2-3.5 on the Richter Scale. Again, the folks monitoring the caldera - this time the Univ. of Utah - play down these events as normal for any active caldera system ... and they're very likely right. However, the media love to bring up the "supervolcano" angle and we're even getting expert opinion from (wait for it) Garrison Keillor!.  The earthquakes are just normal earthquakes so far - none of the dreaded/anticipated harmonic…

Ubinas, Peru

There are, indeed, other volcanoes erupting right now worldwide other than Chaiten. Of course, when you have an eruption like Chaiten going on, it is hard to pay attention to other eruptions. Ubinas, Peru Ubinas, in Peru, has been having intermittent ash eruptions for the past few months, depositing ash on the surround communities. Apparently these eruptions have been causing some respiratory ailments to the local Peruvians due to the ash & volcanic gases. Ubinas is one of the most active volcanoes in Peru. This picture shows Ubinas erupting in 2006, as captured from the International…

TSA's gift to you: Forced groping for rape victims

Rape Victim Refuses TSA Breast Grope; Handcuffed, Arrested by Police: Claire Hirschkind couldn't go through the stripsearch scanner because of a pacemaker-type device in her chest. So she was taken to a female TSA officer to be groped. "I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" Hirschkind told KVUE in Austin. After refusing to acquiesce, she was arrested. "The police actually pushed me to the floor, and handcuffed me," she said. "I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security." Hirschkind had planned…

Life's little victories

At Wednesday's TSA oversight hearing, chief administrator John Pistole did not break down and reverse the "gate rape" patdown policy. But he did make a generous offer: The head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) offered on Wednesday to have airport screeners come to Capitol Hill to give senators a pat-down so they could fully understand the mechanics of the newly deployed, controversial technique. No word on which Senators took him up on it. Senator Vitter is reported to have wondered whether wearing diapers interfered with the search. The good news is that there are a lot…

Not even wrong

Bruce Chapman, head Disco. DJ, thinks we're going through global cooling: It certainly seems so this spring. Winter on the East Coast was grim and summer temperatures are hard to find now in the West. Snowfall also higher than in decades past. It doesn't mean anything except this: there is (and should be) a real debate. In fact, NASA found this to have been the hottest April on record, and the hottest January-April on record. Which is to say, this was not a notably cool spring. April also saw the lowest snowfall on record for that month. In other words, it doesn't matter that Chapman…

Net.hate

There are few things that Richard Dawkins and Matt Nisbet agree about regarding science communication in the internets, but apparently there's a general consensus that you're a douchebag. I haven't got strong feelings on the RichardDawkins.net forum shutdown. Dawkins is right that people were dicks to him and his staff, but the self-righteousness of this opening to his announcement doesn't engender sympathy: Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website…

Jon Miller on Civic Scientific Literacy

There's lots to delve into in Jon Miller's study of civic scientific literacy, not least that US student jump from poor science performance in high school to high science literacy as adults thanks largely to the mandatory year-long science course most colleges require. More important, perhaps, is the fact that (using path analyses controlling for age, education, and other relevant social variables) TV viewership has a negative effect on science literacy, while print media consumption has a small positive effect and internet usage has a substantial positive effect. Could this be thanks to…

None of that "book learnin"

Via ThinkProgress we learn that our old friend Chris Buttars has had a brainstorm about how to fix the state budget: The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade. The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republicanâs assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school⦠We last encountered Buttars when he tried to push creationism in Utah's schools under the moniker "divine design," and you may…

Drumroll please

NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott has been awarded the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the most prestigious award from the most prominent scientific honor society in the nation (at least). Care to guess the reaction at Billy Dembski's place?: Iâm heartened to see our tax dollars working to such good effect. The NAS is a publicly chartered nonprofit, not a government agency. The award's past winners include Clinton science advisor Neal Lane (whose names are anagrams of one another), Herbert Hoover (for work done before his presidency), and J. Edgar Hoover (for actions taken while…

Shorter Denyse O'Leary

Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinists resort to whining when they are not popular (Also, this just in, water runs downhill): In responding to a news item from two weeks ago, I'll assume Creation still has gotten a distributor. Therefore it's crummy and boring and will never get a distributor, as it did last week. With Bonus Shorter D'oh! Leary: Origin of life theory: Complexity theorist Kauffman moving on: I don't know who Stuart Kauffman is or what he does, but he sure isn't a genius. Neither is Bill Dembski, who at least has the courtesy not to self-aggrandize, for instance by…

Deep Thoughts

Legislative conferences have better swag in the exhibits hall than do science conferences. To whit: free beer in the hall itself. Also free condoms, free chocolate (including both M&Ms and chocolate Pill dispensers), toys from Toy Manufacturers of America, and no fewer than five versions of the US Constitution. Also, the John Birch Society still exists, and is handing out both constitutions and DVDs inveighing against the national constitutional convention that unnamed forces are apparently agitating for. In Philadelphia. The American Association for Nude Recreation is handing out pins…

Does the pill matter?

Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes: The concern of the researchers is that a woman who gets involved with a guy while on the pill might find that she's no longer compatible with him once she stops later on in the relationship. Imagine waking up next to your boyfriend, or even your husband, one morning only to discover that you're just not that into him. While female comedians make such scenarios commonplace in their stand-up routines,…

Bernie Madoff was a cheater in more ways than one

Woman Tells of Affair With Madoff in New Book: Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi scheme was revealed in December. What the charity says it did not know, however, was that Sheryl Weinstein, its chief financial officer when it made those investments, was having an affair with Mr. Madoff. Ms. Weinstein, who has been married for 37 years, discloses that relationship in "Madoff's Other…

This is reproductive fitness!

Nine Mouths to Feed: This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children -- each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart. Reports of Henry's prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.'s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking. Talk about a diverse genetic portfolio! So has there been a lot of…

Read Aloud

I should have known, but did not, that being read aloud to was a learned skill. It never occurred to me to think about it from my privileged place in the world of literacy. I was, for a time, though a teacher of writing, a fish who swam in words without thinking of the water. Like a lot of book-valuing, over-educated parents, I read to my sons from the moment they were born. Tiny babies snuggled on my lap as I read _Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop_, _Jamberry_ and Eli's favorite cliff-hanger _Who Says Quack?_. We graduated on to picture books, and then Winnie the Pooh, Little House and other…

The "myth" of basic science?

I'm a clinician, but I'm actually also a translational scientist. It's not uncommon for those of us in medicine involved in some combination of basic and clinical research to argue about exactly what that means. The idea is translational science is supposed to be the process of "translating" basic science discoveries into the laboratory into medicine, be it in the form of drugs, treatments, surgical procedures, laboratory tests, diagnostic tests, or anything else that physicians use to diagnose and treat human disease. Trying to straddle the two worlds, to turn discoveries in basic science…

12 lies about "12 mainstream vaccine lies" refuted

Listicles. I hate Listicles. I don't do them. Yet, as much as I hate them, I can't deny that in this brave new world of click bait, listicles bring the clicks, which is why so many blogs and websites post them. Indeed, there's a website, Thrillist, that is dedicated to pretty much nothing but listicles. Not surprisingly, quacks and cranks love listicles as well, because they can go viral, getting passed around through the fevered swamp of antivaccine and quack Facebook pages and Twitter feeds like measles through a Waldorf School. So it was that I came across yet another one of these annoying…

An Ontario court dooms a First Nations girl with cancer

A few weeks ago, Steve Novella invited me on his podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, to discuss a cancer case that has been in the news for several months now. The case was about an 11-year-old girl with leukemia who is a member of Canada’s largest aboriginal community. Steve wrote about this case nearly a month ago. Basically, the girl’s parents have been fighting for the right to use “natural healing” on their daughter after they stopped her chemotherapy in August because of side effects. It is a profoundly disturbing case, just as all the other cases I’ve discussed in which…

Another week of GW News, February 1, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... February 1, 2009 Top Stories:WGMS, Monaco Declaration, Solomon et al., Dead Zones, Y-D Impact, CO2 Warming, WEF, McKinsey Report Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Late Comments -- Irena, WFES, Polls, Survey, TVA, Particulates Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production, Liberia's Armyworm Plague Hurricanes, GHGs,…

Bill Maher flames out in a pyre of stupidity over vaccines--again

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again. Yes, I know I've used this clip before at least twice and the line in it several more times over the last couple of years. However, sometimes it's just so completely appropriate to how I'm feeling about a topic I'm about to write about that I just don't care and have to use it again. This is one of those times. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award bestowed upon him by the Atheist Alliance International (a.k.a. Bill Maher, anti-vaccine comedian and host of Real Time With Bill Maher, has decided, after an all too brief…

"Integrative oncology": Quackademic medicine victorious?

One of the main topics that I've covered over the last four or five of laying down a swath of not-so-Respectful Insolence directed at pseudoscience is the relatively rapid, seemingly relentless infiltration of pseudoscience into what should be bastions of science-based medicine (SBM), namely medical schools and academic medical centers promoted by academics who should, but apparently don't, know better. This infiltration has been facilitated by a variety of factors, including changes in the culture of medical academia and our own culture in general, not to mention a dedicated cadre of…

What next for the randomized controlled clinical trial?

One of the most frequent complaints about evidence-based medicine (EBM), in contrast to science-based medicine (SBM), is its elevation of the randomized clinical trial as the be-all and end-all for clinical evidence for an intervention for a particular disease or condition. Unknown but enormous quantities of "digital ink" have been spilled explaining this distinction right here on this blog, and I tened to like to refer to this aspect of EBM as "methodolatry," a term I originally learned from another ScienceBlogs blogger (now moved on) and defined as profane worship of the randomized…

Quack attack: Naturopaths and supplement companies press for naturopathic licensure in Michigan

Over the years, I’ve taken care of women with locally advanced breast cancer so advanced that it’s eroded through the skin, forming huge, nasty ulcers filled with stinky dead cancer tissue that’s outgrown its blood supply, leaving the patient in chronic pain. If the patient is fortunate, her cancer has not metastasized beyond her axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under her arm), and her life might still be saved by a combination of chemotherapy, radical surgery, and radiation. If the patient is not fortunate, either the cancer has metastasized and she is doomed or hasn’t metastasized yet…

Circadian Quackery

Believe me, I love the word "circadian". It is a really cool word, invented by Franz Halberg in the late 1950s, out of 'circa' (Latin - "about") and diem ("a day"), to denote daily rhythms in biochemistry, physiology and behavior generated by the internal, endogenous biological clocks within living organisms. It's been a while since the last time I found someone mistaking the word for 'cicada' which is a really cool insect. 'Circadian' has become quite common term in the media and, these days increasingly, in popular culture. Names of some bands contain the word. A few blogs' names…

Tiger Mothers, Depression Moms and Reasonable Expectations

I didn't expect to like _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ - in fact, I expected to hate it. Instead, I found it funny, charming and moving - and give Amy Chua a lot of credit for having the ovaries to expose herself. I didn't just like the book, I loved it. If that seems strange, give me a minute to explain before you assume I'm secretly Mommy Dearest ;-). I should note that I am not a Tiger parent, although Chua and I perhaps have more in common than you might think. You see, like Chua, I don't necessarily think that that assumptions of western parenting are always right. Like Chua, I…

Circadian Quackery

Believe me, I love the word "circadian". It is a really cool word, invented by Franz Halberg in the late 1950s, out of 'circa' (Latin - "about") and diem ("a day"), to denote daily rhythms in biochemistry, physiology and behavior generated by the internal, endogenous biological clocks within living organisms. It's been a while since the last time I found someone mistaking the word for 'cicada' which is a really cool insect. 'Circadian' has become quite common term in the media and, these days increasingly, in popular culture. Names of some bands contain the word. A few blogs' names…

About that 130,000 y.o. Human Occupation in California

A claim is being made, in a recent issue of Nature Magazine, that humans were active in the vicinity of San Diego well over 100,000 years before archaeologists think humans were even in the New World. Most commentary on this claim dismisses it out of hand, but out of hand rejections are no better than foundationless assertions. Let's take a closer look at the Cerutti Mastodon Site. But first, some important context. The Near Consensus on North American Prehistory The Clovis Culture is a Native American phenomenon that occurred between about 12 and 10 thousand years ago (most likely between…