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Tropics Hotting Up? (And Meet Chantal)

The National Hurricane Center just named our third Atlantic storm, Chantal, off the eastern seaboard. Chantal is heading across the Atlantic along with the westerlies, possibly destined to become a quite powerful extratropical storm as it travels towards Iceland and Europe. It is not a threat to the USA. Anyways: Meet Chantal, currently on a rough latitude parallel with New Jersey: But before paying too much attention to Chantal, we could have more to worry about from a tropical wave that the National Hurricane Center is currently calling 99L, located northeast of South America and traveling…

Wordle your dissertation

One of my graduate students reminded my co-instructors and me of a fun internet tool called Wordle which takes text you give it, and makes a graphical representation of the text based on the number of times certain words appear. We used this idea to summarize the course we've just finished on the history and philosophy of engineering education, and then I wanted to keep playing so I made a wordle of my dissertation. The whole thing. Well, except for the references. It's below the fold. If you want to play along, wordle your dissertation at http://www.wordle.net and share the link with us…

Back, and digging out

We got back from Isle Royale Saturday night to a house with no toilet. Luckily enough, we have another house a mere 120 miles away, so really got home late late late Saturday night, and spent Sunday recovering. Today, shockingly, I actually got a good dent done in my research! I'll have some stories to tell over the next couple of days about our 3 days Up Nort, including a moose encounter and some wild orchid macro shots, or you can get the photographic preview here. Suffice it to say for now that it was fabulous, but cold, but fabulous - over 20 miles of hiking, and only 3 other…

Envisioning Science

(Photo by Felice Frankel)  Reseacher, author and science photographer Felice Frankel is the winner of this year's Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical and Scientific Photography. Frankel is a researcher at MIT and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, where she is head of the Envisioning Science Program, which emphasizes the use of images to communicate science. Frankel has written several books on this subject (the latest one, called Envisioning Science, was published by MIT Press in 2002), and some of her writing on it can be found…

Brain-computer interface for controlling Second Life avatars

Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars without moving a muscle. The device consists of a headset containing electrodes which monitor electrical activity in the motor cortex, the region of the brain involved in planning, executing and controlling movements. All a user has to do to control his/her avatar is imagine performing various movements. The activity monitored by the headpiece is read and plotted by an electroencephalogram, which…

Can you hear this painting?

Yellow Red Blue, by Wassily Kandinsky. After attending a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in St. Petersburg, Kandinsky said, "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." Kandinsky was describing his experience of a condition called tone-colour synaesthesia, in which sounds elicit visual sensations. In his paintings, Kandinsky tried to evoke the visual equivalent of a symphony. The word synaesthesia comes from the Greek roots syn, meaning 'together', and aesthesis, meaning 'sensation'. The condition was first described…

Life without memory

I found this two-part documentary on YouTube. It's about a musician called Clive Wearing, who became amnesic following a herpes encephalitis infection that damaged his hippocampus, as well as parts of his frontal and temporal lobes. Wearing's is the most severe case of anterograde amnesia ever recorded. Unlike the famous amnesic Henry M., who can learn simple motor skills, Wearing is incapable of forming any new memories whatsoever.  Wearing is the subject of this article in The New Yorker, by Oliver Sacks, whose new book about music and the mind is to be published soon. [The…

Stranded on New Brainland

Looking for an unusual brain atlas for that very special neuroscientist in your life? This one is a bit non-traditional, but...wow.... By Sam Brown, 2007 The above map's original data was created from a reference photo of a real human brain which was used to build the 3d terrain. This digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading and to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation. Real New Zealand public domain data was then added for the surrounding islands. This appeared as the cover of the most recent issue of the journal…

Lawn mowers, lizards, & longitudinal cross-sections

Images from a Thai ad campaign for Black & Decker lawnmowers! Yikes. While I appreciate the sharpness of any blade that could slice such a clean, anatomically elegant cross-section through a living snake, I have to also say "eeeuw." Poor critters! Unfortunately, industrial harvesters do chop up lizards and snakes, although less surgically than this. Many years ago, when I was working the night shift at a produce freezing plant, we had to pick bits of reptile, insect, and amphibian out of the frozen vegetables. Fun job, that. Anyway, the strangest thing (besides the idea that this…

A naturalist's color palette, circa 1686

From Richard Waller, "A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6, 1686/1687 (London, 1688) Noting the lack of a standard for colors in natural philosophy, and inspired by a similar table published in Stockholm, Richard Waller indicated that his "Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple" would permit unambiguous descriptions of the colors of natural bodies. To describe a plant, for example, one could compare it to the chart and use the names found there to identify…

Seaweed like ribbons, jellyfish like jewels

Seaweed Picture No. 31 Alyson Denny Photographer Alyson Denny's closeups of seaweed and jellyfish couldn't be less like your usual natural science documentation. Often, very little of her subject is in focus; she's more concerned with how the forms and colors blur and overlap as the field recedes. From a distance, her photographs are dazzling abstractions; the jellyfish photos are reminiscent of jewel-encrusted sets for high-end, artsy diamond ads. But when you realize what the subjects are, you also realize that her photos are just what you'd see if, like a child, you were lying on the…

Schrodinger's Rapist

An awesome post from Shapely Prose - written for all the good single guys out there. When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger's Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won't know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can't see inside your head, and I don't know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you--to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy--you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.Fortunately, you're a good guy. We've already established that. Now that you're…

Consider yourself a medium hog

How NOT to practice medicine - no matter how bad the health care situation gets: Benson has no medical degree. His expertise comes from his youth, which was spent on a farm in Indiana. "When one of us needed medical attention," he told me, "we dipped into our veterinary supplies." According to Benson, many pharmaceuticals for animals are the same as those formulated for humans, and can be purchased without a prescription at veterinary supply stores, of which most rural communities have several. In figuring out how to translate livestock dosages to human ones, Benson offers this jaunty rule of…

How much snow do you have? Contribute to crowdsourced science

An invitation from scienceforcitizens.net: As record levels of snow blanket much of the United States this year, Science For Citizens is collaborating with an important climate research project at the University of Waterloo called Snow Tweets. We're pleased that this is the first of many scientific projects that you'll be able to do on Science for Citizens. To help researchers track climate change, we're requesting that you find a ruler, put on a warm coat, go outside, and measure the depth of snow wherever you happen to be. And then report the depth to us right here. That's all there is to…

Hidden treasures of astrophotography

Joe DePasquale was a winner of the European Southern Observatory's hidden treasures 2010 competition with this lovely photo. From ESO: "The pictures of the Universe that can be seen in ESO's releases are impressive. However, many hours of skilful work are required to assemble the raw greyscale data captured by the telescopes into these colourful images, correcting them for distortions and unwanted signatures of the instrument, and enhancing them so as to bring out the details contained in the astronomical data. ESO has a team of professional image processors, but for the ESO's Hidden…

Iceland: Actually, We Really Did Mean "No Whaling Allowed"

Did Iceland not get the memo, or what? They just broke a 21-year international moratorium on commercial whaling by killing an endangered fin whale. Last week Iceland announced that it planned to resume commercial whaling (Norway and Japan already are doing it), flouting the ban put in place by the International Whaling Commission in 1985. Now, they aren't going to be just harpooning willy-nilly; they will only take in 9 fin whales and 30 minke whales each year. This is in comparison to Norway's quota of 1052 minke whales per year, and whatever Japan catches for "research" purposes. What's…

Wordlerizing Darwin, Watson and Crick

I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text. I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No surprise, "species" is the dominant word. But I like the appearance of "will" as a dominant word as well, suggesting the inexorable drive of evolution. . . I also Wordlerized Watson and Crick's seminal Nature paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and got this pretty vertical column: In…

On the lookout for blogs by stuggling scientific underlings

Yesterday I and a few local PhDs had a chat with a reporter from [insert name of big newspaper here] and we started talking about the life of a gradstudent and/or postdoc in the biomedical sciences. At the end of the conversation I brought up the academic blog scene and the reporter asked for a list of blogs written by gradstudents and or postdocs. I've started to compile a list of blogs that convey the zeitgeist of life in the lower rungs of the academic ladder, but I am also soliciting your help. What am I looking for? As an example, I'll point to Ambivalent Academic who posted an excellent…

UCL launches neuroscience website

This beautiful two-photon microscopy image, by Alanna Watt and Michael Hausser, shows a network of Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex. Named after the Czech anatomist who discovered them, Purkinje cells are the largest cells in the mammalian brain. They have a planar structure with a highly elaborate dendritic tree which forms hundreds of thousands of synapses with the parallel fibres of cerebellar granule cells, and a single axon which projects down into the deep cerebellar nuclei. The image comes from a collection inspired by the UCL Neuroscience website, which has just been launched…

Bioephemera et al

I'm very pleased to announce that Bioephemera has just moved to ScienceBlogs. This fantastic blog is a curiosity box of wonderful things, such as this nineteenth century wax anatomical model by Clemente Susini, of a man's head and neck, which shows the brain's superficial blood vessels and the branches of the trigeminal and hypoglossal nerves. Bioephemera is written by Jessica Palmer, who created four of the five beautiful banners which grace the top of this page. There are also several other new SBlogs which I haven't gotten round to mentioning yet: A Good Poop - very amusing papers from…

I can't give medical advice

Every so often, I get an email from someone who is seeking advice on some medical issue. For example, I received this short message a few days ago: I just came across your report on Risperdal, and was wondering what your take is on a 3 year old taking Seroquel? How about a dosage of 900 mg per day? My daughter has been on it for almost one year now. Please give me your honest feedback on this. My honest opinion is that a 2- or 3-year-old child should not be prescribed any kind of antipsychotic. But that's just an opinion, and, I should stress, a non-professional one. I did not study…

Animal experiments? No Sir

Professor Colin Blakemore (right), a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who was formerly chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), has been denied a knighthood "because of his outspoken support for animal research." This is not the first time Blakemore has been overlooked in the annual honours list, and the fact that the honours system is corrupt and outdated will probably be little consolation to him. Unlike those who have bought the title "Sir", Blakemore deserves a peerage, as he is one of the few scientists who have publicly supported animal research, even though…

Cuts In 2008 Shark Take Quotas Not Enough

OCEANA Europe is not pleased with European Commission's proposals for 2008 shark quotas for Total Allowable Catches (TACs). Two of the species included in the proposal are both considered Critically Endangered in the North East Atlantic by the IUCN and thus Zero TAC's are needed. For the spurdog (Squalus acanthias) the EC recommends a 25% decrease from last year but the 2,752 ton catch limit is still far above the scientific recommendations for these species. Much of the problem centers on deep-sea sharks which are particularly susceptible to overfishing due to their late maturity, slow…

Really Big Lobsters & The People Who Save Them

How much would you pay to save a lobster? $160 is the amount Chris Crowell and his wife Jyll Prole paid to purchase a lobster from a Halifax grocery store. Why so much? The lobster, now named Rex, weighed in at 7kg (15.4 lbs). The couple donated Rex to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography where Jim Frost, laboratory manager, estimates Rex is 60 years old based on his size. Although large, Rex will not be the largest on record. The top 3 largest lobsters, Homarus americanus, by weight on record are. 'Mike' caught in 1934 19.25kg (42.44 lbs) an unconfirmed, unnamed female at 11.34kg (…

Donors Choose Reminder

Dear Incredibly Wealthy Readers, A week or so back we announced our participation in the Donors Choose challenge. Specifically, we are raising money for elementary school teachers in the Bronx to bring animals into the classroom and a teacher outside of DC build out his outdoor ecology program. These are worthy, and very affordable, causes. Just imagine it: a tarantula in a 1st grade classroom named after you! If you have a minute and can spare some money for a small donation, it would be much appreciated. There is a banner ad type link if you scroll down on the left sidebar or you can click…

Filthy, Flying, Chinese Street Cats!

After a recent heat wave in China's Sichuan province, local cats sprouted strange appendages resembling wings, as reported in the Bill Moyer's Journal of England, the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail claims to have spoken with genetic experts (i.e. Nigel in the mail room) who said that these growths come from "poor grooming, a genetic defect or a hereditary skin condition." Note: They also said that though the wings do contain bones, they do not not interfere with quality of the cats' lives. "Mutated ally cats are where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." More pics below the fold…

Life in the Fast Lane

Researchers from Oklahoma State University have discovered the shortest living tetrapod (four limbed vertebrate) to date. The hard-livin' Labord's Chameleon spends 8-9 months incubating within the egg, only to hatch and die 4-5 months later. Published in the July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report states: "Remarkably, this chameleon spends more of its short annual life cycle inside the egg than outside of it. Our review of tetrapod longevity (>1,700 species) finds no others with such a short life span." Most tetrapods live between 2 and 10 years. 8…

Soon to be a major motion picture?

Apparently Blake Stacey is pitching a movie about the Dover trial and featuring, as central characters, some luminaries from ScienceBlogs. There's sort of a Star Trek: The Original Series meets Star Trek: The Next Generation meets other iconic exemplars of science fiction and action genres vibe in the plot outline and casting ideas. At least, so far. Me, I figured a ScienceBlogs movie might run more along the lines of All the President's Men meets This is Spinal Tap. Although there would definitely be stuff blowing up. On the off chance that a studio exec is reading, this is your chance…

Question for the hivemind.

Which has a larger carbon footprint: An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper? How much difference does it make if you're using the carbon paper in an electric typewriter as opposed to a manual one? How much less is the environmental impact from being able to proofread on the screen before printing out and making your copies (which I'm assuming is itself lower impact than printing multiple copies ... but maybe I'm wrong)? How do we pin down the relevant impacts of the manufacture of the computer and printer and photocopier compared to those of the manufacture of…

A fleeting idea about health care reform.

The better half and I were trying to decide this morning whether there was a way to follow the progress of "health care reform" in the U.S. Senate without getting really mad or really sad. (Conclusion: It seems logically possible that such a way exists, but we haven't found it yet.) The one player that seems likely to get much of what it wants in all this seems to be the insurance industry. Given that the folks working out who gets what are politicians, this does not surprise me. So it occurred to me that maybe we shouldn't be trusting politicians to achieve health care reform. Instead…

Friday Sprog Blogging: meet the silkworms (part 1).

This week, our first-ever video sprog blog. (Yeah, I know, I'm going to have to turn in my Luddite card now.) Because it's hard to do silkworms justice unless you can watch them squirm! Recall that these silkworms (who you've already seen in pictures) hatched from eggs that came home last June and stayed in the refrigerator until spring (when mulberry trees are nice and leafy). Dr. Free-Ride's better half warns that the silkworms are slightly out of focus in this video. I remind you that here at Friday Sprog Blogging, we make a point of protecting the identities of the very young. Yeah,…

Has NASA discovered aliens? Again?

Probably not, but they are cagily announcing a rather unusual press conference that has a certain familiar ring to it. MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT, Thursday, Sept. 15, to announce a new discovery by the Kepler mission. The briefing will be held in the Syvertson auditorium, building N-201, at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The event will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website... The Kepler mission is focused on finding Earth-size planets in the Goldilocks Zone, where, say, alien life could live. But of…

Jesus won't bring you any presents!

I don't know whether this is staged or not, but it's bizarrely amusing: someone video taped his mother's reaction to learning he is an atheist. Mom throws a hissy fit. After a bit of denial, she brings the big guns to bear on the poor guy: if he's an atheist, he's not going to get any presents for Christmas, because it's all about Jesus. After crushing him with that overwhelming threat, what's she going to do to punish him when she finds out he posted her tirade on Youtube? It's good parenting skills to know you don't launch the thermonuclear missiles with the first offense, because you won'…

Quote of the day: J. R. R. Tolkien on mercy

From The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, specifically the chapter The Shadow of the Past, in which Gandalf responds to Frodo's statement that Gollum is an enemy who deserves death: Deserves it? I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. I sometimes wonder if reading that quote as a youth was a seed that ultimately lead to my changing my mind…

Hungover Bats Crave Food Just Like Humans

Apparently after a long night of drinking, Egyptian fruit bats wake up craving particular types of sugar. In a recent study, Francisco Sanchez from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) showed that the bats prefer foods high in the sugar molecule, fructose, after eating slightly fermented figs and dates. Fructose is known to reduce the toxicity of ethanol. After eating the alcoholic fruit, the bats even show visible signs of inebriation, such as bumping into objects and having a higher susceptibility to predators. As of yet, Sanchez has not witnessed a group of bats singing "Tiny…

Teabagger attempts to kill Muslim in NYC

In addition to a serious neck wound, Ahmed H. Sharif suffered cuts to forearms, face and one hand while trying to fend off Enright, prosecutor James Zeleta said while arguing against bail. Enright had asked Mr. Sharif if he was a Muslim, and when he responded in the affirmative, Enright yelled some Arabic words, and told him to "consider this a checkpoint" while he attacked him with a Leatherman or similar tool weapon. Enright volunteered for Intersections International, a group that promotes interfaith dialogue and has supported a controversial proposed mosque near ground zero. ... Sharif…

"Conversion, Deconversion and Religious Indoctrination" Atheists Talk #78, Sunday August 8, 2010

Conversion is the process through which a person's orientation on reliigion changes. How do people turn from and to new religious groups, ways of life, systems of belief and modes of relating to a deity or a the nature of reality. Dr. Grant Steves will be with me in the studio to discuss faith, conversion and deconversion with a dollop of religious indoctrination. Dr. Grant Steves is a member of the Minnesota Atheists. He has a doctorate in Theology, and is an atheist. Mike Haubrich is a director on the board of the Minnesota Atheists, a former Catholic and deconverted evangelical…

They are still looking for Charles Manson's Victims

Manson It is amazing to consider that Charles Manson's crimes (stemming from religious cultism) are still under investigation. Apparently, there will be some digging at a ranch occupied by "The Manson Family" because there is suspicion that there are more bodies to be found. ...police are to carry out excavation work at a Californian ranch to search for more possible victims of notorious mass murderer Charles Manson. They believe more bodies may be buried at the ranch in the Death Valley national park where Manson and his followers hid after the killings. Manson was convicted in 1969 of…

Happy Birthday Spam

On May third, 1978, Gary Thuerk, working for the Digital Equipment Corporation Marketing Department, sent 393 unsolicited emails to users of Arpanet (arpanet would eventually become The Internet). Thuerk and Digitial Equipment Corporation were both chastised for this, and the official Arpanet administrators reprimanded DEC. Nobody liked the fact that Gary Thuerk had done this, and it was all round considered to be a bad idea, an abuse of the system, and something that should never happen again. Check out this page at New Scientist, on Spam. Also on this day, in 1491 Kongo leader Nkuwu…

Frank Gehry: From 1990, defending a vision for architecture

Speaking at TED in 1990, the not-yet-legendary architect Frank Gehry takes a whistlestop tour of his work to date, from his own Venice Beach house to the under-construction American Center in Paris. In this 50-minute slideshow (before TED's 18-minute limit), Gehry explains the site-specific nature of his buildings -- context he felt was lost in the discussions of his then-controversial work. In this candid and funny talk, he exposes his own messy creative process ("I take pieces and bits, and look at it, and struggle with it, and cut it away...") and the way he struggles with problems ("This…

Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Evah!

NASA astronomers were blown away last week by what was far and away the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever observed. GRB 080319B, shown here in x-ray [left] and optical/ultraviolet [right] views captured by the Swift satellite, burned so brightly that its afterglow was briefly visible to the naked eye from its origin 7.5 billion light-years (or half a universe) away. If placed side-by-side with the brightest supernova ever seen, the burst would still outshine it by a factor of 2.5 million, researchers calculated. GRBs typically occur when the explosion of a dying star gets channeled into…

Clearly, Ralph Nader is Working for the Republicans

Ralph Nader has formed a presidential exploratory committee and said he will launch another presidential run if he believes he can raise enough money to appear on most state ballots in the fall. ... ...now with John Edwards also out of the race, Nader said he feels his candidacy is more urgent than ever. "When Kucinich threw in the towel, now you have Edwards gone -- who's going to carry the torch of democratic populism against the relentless domination of our government" by "powerful corporations," he told ABC. "You can't just brush these issues to the side because the candidates are…

Work interferes with skepticism yet again...but maybe not for you

Bummer, people. The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism has been announced for 2011 and will take place on April 9 and 10 in New York. It's going to be bigger and better than ever, going from one day to a whole weekend, and it has a killer lineup of speakers. And I can't go. Damn you American Association for Cancer Research. If you had scheduled the AACR meeting one week later, I could have done what I did last year and made my meeting trip a two-fer, with a stop off for the NECSS conference first and then concluding with my yearly dose of cancer research updates. Oh, well... But…

A vision of the future of medicine

Along with Dr. R. W., I've become known for my rather vociferously expressed dismay at the ever increasing infiltration of unscientific and non-evidence-based woo in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medical centers. Well, thanks to a reader, I've seen a vision of the future of American medicine, and it's frightening. Imagine, if you will, an academic medical center where the infiltration of woo is complete, where all manner of "alternative" modalities are viewed as equal or even superior to our unfeeling and nonwholistic scientific medicine. Imagine, if…

Distributing Mockery

John Holbo finds this piece of stupidity from Mark Steyn: Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked…

Creationism and the DDT ban myth

I've stated before that folks who peddle the DDT ban myth tend to be those who don't believe in evolution and hence don't believe that mosquitoes can evolve resistance to DDT. One or two commenters felt that I was trying to tar those folks with the creationist brush. Jonathan Sarfati was Andrew Bolt's source for his nonsense about bedbugs and DDT and also showed up in comments to accuse greens of banning DDT to "solve" the overpopulation problem. Jonathan Sarfati is a Young Earth Creationist. Using a sockpuppet named Socrates he wrote: In some cases, insects required resistance, and…

Does the war in Gaza and Lebanon fit the criteria for a "just war"?

Fellow traveler in the fight against Holocaust denial Andrew Mathis asks whether Israel has adequate justification for its recent attacks in Lebanon and Gaza based on "just war theory." Basically, he finds that Israel meets many of the criteria, but fails in proportionality of response and using force as a last resort. However, he finds that Hezbollah and Hamas fail to meet these criteria by an even greater degree. I'm not sure I agree with all of it (for instance, I wouldn't be nearly so hard on the Lebanese government, given that it really doesn't have the power to rein in Hezbollah or…

QuackSafe⢠Google searching

Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you're unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here's a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has put together a QuackSafe⢠Search Engine: The Search Engine will only return matches from sites and blogs that are known to supply reliable information about quackery, quacks, medical fraud and pseudoscience. It is based on the newly…

Oregon Petition and the right

John Quiggin uses the Oregon Petition to illustrate the way the right insulates itself from knowledge about the world: This kind of thinking is by no means unique to the contemporary right. But it is ubiquitous, and the staying power of the Oregon petition indicates way. Even the silliest claim, once made part of the canon must be defended to the last. In extreme cases, there is the option of dropping an utterly discredited talking point and then saying "we never said that". This is one thing the Internet has made much harder, with the perverse result that obstinacy in error has become more…

The Day the Music Died

This song has always brought tears to my eyes. It discussed events that occurred before I was born, but which triggered changes that have been unfolding since, throughout all of our lifetimes. Now, this video has filled in all the holes in my contextual understanding, and made me more emotional about "the Day the Music Died" than ever: But perhaps the most disturbing discovery was not in the video, but in the comments on YouTube. Most were quite complimentary. A few others questioned the veracity of the chosen images. But this one just about killed me: i always thght it was a maddona song…