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Drilling into active magma

Drilling in Iceland lead by geologists from UC Davis hit magma this week. Image courtesy of Peter Schiffman, UC Davis. Quick props to my officemate here at UC Davis, Naomi Marks, who happened to be part of a team (with UC Davis geology faculty Peter Schiffman and Robert Zierenberg) that drilled into active rhyolite magma in Iceland this week. Doesn't happen very often - this might be the third recorded time humans have drilled into magma - but when it does, it is very exciting. The magma was hit ~2 miles / 5 km below the surface and is likely an offshoot of a larger magmatic system nearby.…

Redoubt Mini-Update for 5/3/2009

For those of you who might not be paying as close attention to Redoubt now as in the past, this is the latest from AVO: Redoubt's 2009 eruption continues and appears to be gaining intensity. Seismic activity has increased markedly in the last 24 hours, showing stronger volcanic tremor and more frequent rockfall events. Minor emissions of ash have also been visible in webcam views during this time period. Steam emissions in particular have become more vigorous over the last 2 hours, with a steam plume now reaching approximately 18,000 feet above sea level. Are we headed to a dome collapse in…

Send me your questions ... and spreading the Eruptions word

Back in the ol' Wordpress days, I did try to have a Mailbag column here on Eruptions. I'd like to restart that here on ScienceBlogs, so if you have any volcano-related questions (or heck, any questions), please email them to me at ewklemett (at symbol) gmail (dot) com. After I get enough questions, I'll answer them in a weekly (biweekly? monthly?) column. Also, if you're into this sort of thing, why not follow Eruptions via Facebook. Click on the link for "Networked Blogs" in the bottom left cover of this page. While you're at it, if you like what you see here, recommend these articles on…

Prenatal Down syndrome tests are a go (at some point)

Last spring there was a false alarm about a noninvasive form of prenatal testing, in particular for Down syndrome. But if The Guardian is right then the British NHS is pushing forward on a more general program in this direction: The early signs are so promising that the professor leading the programme says that the risk-free test could be the standard method of detecting babies with some genetic conditions inherited from the father within two to three years and those with Down's syndrome within five - and in the process save the lives of an estimated 265 mostly normal babies a year. The life-…

Dinosaurs not as massive

So claims a researcher whose work will be published in the Journal of Zoology, Dinosaurs shed a few tons in science makeover: "We have found that the statistical model is seriously flawed and the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed." The research does not suggest that dinosaurs were shorter in length or height. These dimensions are clear from the size of their bones. Instead, Packard's work challenges the depiction of many giant herbivores. Until now they have been shown as well-rounded, powerful animals, when they are more likely to have been…

Design flaws support evolution

This is a nicely done lecture on design flaws in our anatomy and physiology, to refute claims of intelligent design. Part 2 Part 3 I know exactly how creationists will reply, though, since I've heard it often enough. She's making a theological argument, they'll say, claiming to know God's intent and making an assumption of his goals. It will be a restatement of the old chestnut, "God works in mysterious ways." However, that's not the argument here. Imperfections and sub-optimal properties are an outcome of evolutionary theory; this is a positive argument that observations of the world best…

Free speech not as important in Eastern Europe

With the whole controversy around Michael Savage being blocked from entering England because of his inflammatory comments I thought I would look at attitudes toward speech. One thing I've noticed is that Americans tend to be less instrumental when it comes to matters of speech; that is, speech is not justified as a means, as opposed to being a basic liberal right. In contrast in most other parts of the world people seem more likely to justify the right to speech as a utility in the service of some other end. This difference results in a variance in the way people approach offensive and…

Media meltdown hits science journalism

Bora points to this report about mega shakeups at Scientific American. The editor for nearly a generation, John Rennie, is out. Nature Publishing Group is now calling the shots. In non-science news Ezra Klein, king of all journolism, is moving to The Washington Post. We live in the age of creative destruction when it comes to media. I'm a dabbler in in writing about science, but as the years go by it seems that the media itself is converging upon my own bloggish means of production. I know that Ross Douthat is going to produce print-worthy column prose for The New York Times, but I have to…

Party in Denmark!

We conquered Australia. The next step is the EU. The atheists are meeting in Copenhagen on 18-20 June, and I've been authorized to tell you that two special guests will be appearing there. The first is the Amazing Randi. You have to go listen to a guy whose first name is Amazing! Besides all the other speakers, this guarantees that we will have a fabulous time. The second is not someone on the speaker list, and she won't be haranguing anyone from a lectern. I'll be going, and at long last, the awesome Trophy Wife™ will be in attendance with me. Just imagine…you'll be able to talk to her and…

Another Week of GW News, June 22, 2008

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 June 22, 2008 A Brief Note Top Stories:Domingues et al., Greenland Ice Cores, Melting Arctic Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHG Stats, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science, Hansen, Pielke Kyoto-2, Carbon Trade, Carbon Tax, Optimal…

Stupid cubed: David Kirby, RFK, Jr., and Generation Rescue use the Bailey Banks case to tag team the antivaccine counterattack against the MMR

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." At least, that's what Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part 3, and even though I'm not a mafia don, I can sort of relate to where he's coming from, if you know what I mean. It seems that whenever I try to get away from blogging about the nigh infinite level of stupidity and pseudoscience that emanates from the disease promotion movement (i.e., the antivaccine movement), it seems as though they somehow find a way to pull me back in. Of course, I'd rather like to think of myself as the reluctant gunslinger pulled out of retirement…

Tag-Teaming with Orac: Bad, Bad Breast Cancer Math in JPANDS

My friend, fellow ScienceBlogger, and BlogFather Orac asked me to take a look at href="http://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/carroll.pdf">a paper that purportedly shows that abortion is a causative risk factor for breast cancer, which he href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/abortion_and_breast_cancer_the_chicago_t.php">posted about this morning. When the person who motivated me to start what's turned out to be a shockingly successful blog asks for something, how could I possibly say no? Especially when it's such a great example of the misuse of mathematics for political purposes…

The pace of evolution

What is a hill? I mean, how do you define a hill as opposed to a mountain, or, flat, level ground. The reality is that all surfaces on the planet which aren't artificial seem to have discontinuities and wrinkles on the macroscale.1 Here is a dictionary definition: A well-defined natural elevation smaller than a mountain. That is rather vague. Is a small mound of dirt that my cousin made a "hill." And what is a mountain? Here is a definition: A natural elevation of the earth's surface having considerable mass, generally steep sides, and a height greater than that of a hill. Since a…

Moving Overseas, Part 1

You might not know this, but I am planning to leave America and move overseas -- permanently. There are a lot of reasons I am doing this, not the least of which is the fact that I am in love with a British scientist and that, even as a child growing up in a farming community, I always took it for granted that I would relocate overseas (it just took a helluva lot longer to accomplish than I ever thought it would). Originally, I thought I'd be moving to Finland -- comparatively easy for me since I'm Finnish and I've fallen in love with that beautiful country, the people and the language.…

Seasonal flu: Why I got vaccinated

I just got my seasonal flu shot. It was free and my medical center is encouraging everyone to get one. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I didn't feel it at all, but in all honesty, I hardly felt it. They must be using smaller needles these days. Anyway, given that most circulating flu virus is pandemic swine flu H1N1, for which a vaccine is not yet available (coming soon to a clinic near you, we're told), you might wonder why I -- or anyone --would bother. I'll do my best to explain my reasoning, but I'll grant at the outset I may have missed some good reasons or have reasons that…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XLI: how I palled around with terrorists

No one who knows me would ever consider me a domestic terrorist. I am, in fact, a pacifist. You may think that's naive, but it would be a real stretch to consider my pacifism to be the same as terrorism, even if you think it helps terrorism (in which case I strenuously disagree). I'm a doctor and take the responsibility to heal pretty seriously. Barack Obama is being accused of "palling around with terrorists" because he has had an association with people the McCain campaign decided they want to call domestic terrorists purely for the purpose of inferring guilt -- guilt, literally, by…

Wage theft in South Florida: Nation's first county with wage theft protections reports on progress and perils

by Kim Krisberg Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers' rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief. Ever since Miami-Dade adopted the nation's first countywide wage theft ordinance in 2010, it's been under attack. For the first two years after its passage, state legislators tried to pass legislation to pre-empt local communities from passing their own wage theft laws; this last legislative session, they tried again but included a carve out for Miami-Dade and for…

Cracking down on deadbeat bosses: Wage theft victory a milestone in Chicago's worker center movement

by Kim Krisberg For Angel Nava, Chicago's newly adopted wage theft ordinance is particularly personal. Until recently, Nava had worked at the same car wash business in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood for 14 years. The 55-year-old employee did it all — washing, detailing, buffing — for about 50 hours each week. Then, his boss decided to stop paying overtime. In fact, Nava didn't receive the overtime he was owed for the last four years he worked at the car wash. He told me (though a translator) that none of his co-workers were receiving overtime either — "everyone was very upset." Nava said he…

The Anyway Project: Update Two

In all the chaos of having interrupted internet and lots of stormy weather, I never posted a January Anyway Project Update - oops, sorry! So here's an early February one, and I'll try and do one in late Feb. as well, because, of course, I'll definitely be accomplishing double in this short month. Sure. If you'd like to participate in The Anyway Project - redesigning your life to make it work better - please just join in. There are no deadlines (obviously ;-)) and no pressures. Wondering what I'm going on about? Here's a quick summary of The Anyway Project: The larger idea of the Anyway…

Once You've Got the Chickens, You'll Hardly Notice the Yaks: Re-Inventing the Diversified Small Farm

Over at ye olde blogge, on one of my Independence Days updates, a reader commented on something that I'd posted. I'd mentioned that we are having trouble with goat parasites - most specifically, meningeal worm. Meningeal worm is a parasite is hosted by snails and transmitted by the feces of white tailed deer. It is worst in camelids like llamas and alpacas, but goats are a secondary host, and two of does, Selene and Mina, have it. It is most common after a wet summer and warm fall - this past summer was the wettest in living memory here - we had almost 20 inches of rain in June alone, and…

Historical contingency in the evolution of E. coli

While I was traveling last week, an important paper came out on evolution in E. coli, describing the work of Blount, Borland, and Lenski on the appearance of novel traits in an experimental population of bacteria. I thought everyone would have covered this story by the time I got back, but there hasn't been a lot of information in the blogosphere yet. Some of the stories get the emphasis wrong, claiming that this is all about the rapid acquisition of complex traits, while the creationists are making a complete hash of the story. Carl Zimmer gets it right, of course, and he has the advantage…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Let's take a look at all seven PLoS journals today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Light, Sleep, and Circadian Rhythms: Together Again: The 24-hour (h) light-dark (LD) cycle is a fundamental characteristic of Earth's environment and so its powerful influence on the behaviour and…

So you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 2.0 - GRE at

More repeats from Ye Olde Blogge So you want to be an astrophysicist? You've suffered through 3-4 years of undergrad, and you're ready for more. You picked the places to apply to (or have you...?), and you're ready for the paperwork. So what do you do. First you apply to the departments. As a rule, go directly to the department web site you are applying to and read carefully (ie do not go to the Graduate School at the University, until/if the department indicates you should), then do as they say. Application deadlines should be around christmas, either just before or after. Most places move…

California poised to adopt violence prevention standard for health care workers: ‘Violence shouldn’t be part of the job’

In 2010, Donna Gross, a psychiatric technician at Napa State Hospital for more than a decade, was strangled to death at work by a mentally ill patient. While on-the-job violence in the health care sector was certainly nothing new at the time, the shocking and preventable circumstances surrounding Gross’ death helped ignite a new and coordinated movement for change. Now, just a handful of years later, California is set to become the only state with an enforceable occupational standard aimed at preventing workplace violence against health care workers. “Honestly, this (proposed rule) wouldn’t…

Everybody Always Gets This Wrong, Even Smart People

This is a great cartoon by Randall Munroe that makes a very important point very effectively. Spread it around, love it, learn from it. Here is an excellent video walkthrough of the cartoon, discussing its value as a communication tool. But do ignore the details of the prehistory because the cartoonist has fallen into the same trap so many others have, well meaning in intention but simply a) not an expert on key things and b) unaware of the real consequences of getting certain things wrong. When we represent prehistory, we represent humanity both past and present. It is not difficult to do…

Answering Comments on Judge Jones' Ruling

Larry Farma has left a long comment in response to my post about the DI's claim that Judge Jones should not have ruled on the scientific status of ID in the Dover case. Because that post is getting old and the comment is so long, I figured it should be moved up top and responded to in its own post. I'll go argument by argument, as usual. Rule 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., discussed in preceding comments, concern only the rules for making a judgment of expert scientific testimony, and have nothing to do with determining when such a judgment should be made. This is true…

Law Review Review: Throw With Great Force

One of the law professors on the ReligionLaw listserv posted a link to a journal article on SSRN by George Dent of Case Western Reserve University. The article, entitled Civil Rights for Whom? Gay Rights Versus Religious Freedom, reminded me of Dorothy Parker's famous one line book review - "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force." It is, quite simply, one of the worst attempts at legal scholarship I have ever come across, beginning with the very first paragraph: Disapproval of homosexuality is widespread, deep-rooted and of long standing.…

What to do with Bible thumping students

.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module"... Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I understand she gave her Life Science teachers a very hard time. This is the only contemporary depiction of Joan of…

A Follow-Up To Yesterday's Post On Evolution and Religion

Philosopher John Wilkins has responded to yesterday's post about conflicts between evolution and religion. Sadly, he so grossly distorts what I said that I don't think he has replied very effectively. John quotes only a single short excerpt from my lengthy post: So, after all, that, let us return to Plait’s argument. He tells us that the problem is too many people perceiving evolution as a threat to their religious beliefs. Indeed, but why do they perceive it that way? Is it a failure of messaging on the part of scientists? Is it because Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers make snide remarks…

Is Religion Really Such a Powerful Social Force?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wheaton College English Professor Alan Jacobs argues that religion is overrated as a social force. My SciBling Razib has already written a lengthy response. Jacobs gets down to business in the third paragraph: Of course, I can't universalize my own experience -- but that experience does give me pause when people talk about the immense power of religion to make people do extraordinary things. When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they're not acting as I usually do, out of…

Barr Bashes ID

Writing in the religious journal First Things University of Delaware physics professor Stephen Barr lays into the ID Movement. Here's the first paragraph: It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the…

Let us pray

Here's another bunch who don't understand science: an article on research on prayer. You know, the creationists are always complaining that all those scientists out there (waves hand vaguely towards the nearest university) are biased and reject supernatural phenomena out of hand, and that their weird metaphysical research program can't get any funding. Can we just face the fact that there are plenty of crackpot scientists and sloppy bureaucrats in the world, and that lots of nonsense gets funded and studied? (More below the fold) But the most controversial research focuses on "intercessory"…

Becker and Posner on Obesity Abatement Laws

There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants: The significance of the New York City ordinance lies in its requiring that calorie numbers be printed next to the food items on menus and menu boards and in large type. The purpose is less to inform than to frighten. Psychologists have shown (what is anyway pretty obvious) that people respond more to information that is presented to them in a dramatic, memorable form than…

The Population Bomb, Nuclear Winter and the Role of Science in Public Advocacy

In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself. A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Here Comes Science!

The Free-Ride family got its copy of the new CD/DVD set Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants this week. The sprogs, who have been listening and watching, offer something kind of like a review. The first thing to note is that, on the DVD, you have a choice of going through the whole set of songs as a "show" with John Flansburg and John Linnell (animated, of course) providing little introductions that are both informative and humorous, or of selecting individual songs (without the intros) from an "A-O" menu and a "P-Z" menu. We tend to gravitate toward the alphabetical song menus, but…

Bumblin' Midgley babbles again

Is Mary Midgley supposed to be the epitome of philosophical confusion and bungling incomprehension? She's like the Emily Litella of science criticism, always going off on harebrained tangents of her own invention, but unlike Litella, nothing ever compels her to offer a meek "Never mind". Midgely has done it again with another tirade against the New Atheists. Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish. For instance, Isaac Newton noted gladly that his theory of gravitation gave a scientific proof of God's existence. Today's anti-god warriors,…

A homeopath lectures scientists about anecdotal evidence

If there's one difference between so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and science-based medicine (SBM), it's the role of anecdotes in each. CAM and SBM each take a very different view of anecdotes. In SBM, anecdotes are relegated to a very low rung on the evidence ladder. They are a starting point in that, if well-documented enough and convincing enough, they can serve as the basis to suggest that clinical research or clinical trials might be indicated. Sometimes, in the case of rare diseases where numbers of patients are so small that randomized clinical trials are not…

Will 2016 be the year when the FDA and FTC finally crack down on homeopathy?

I like to say that homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All (although of late I've debated whether homeopathy or reiki is the most properly referred to as that). It's a strange beast, homeopathy. Its two main "Laws" are so clearly pseudoscience that you'd think that no one could ever fall for something that dumb, but, well over 200 years after Samuel Hahnemann pulled those two Laws out of his nether regions, not only is homeopathy still popular in large swaths of the developed world, but there are actual physicians who use it. Just consider homeopathy's laws. The first is the Law of…

How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?

Humans appear to have a reasonable amount of diversity in their sexual orientations, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of th is diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes. Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or sexuality…

Fun with a naturopathic rant against The SkepDoc

As many of you probably know, I'm proud to call Dr. Harriet Hall (a.k.a. the SkepDoc) my friend, and, I daresay, so is my wife. We've both hung out with her at the last two TAMs, and we've hit it off pretty well. I also admire her history of standing up for science, reason, and science-based medicine, something she's been doing longer than I have. I can only hope that one day I will reach her level of respect within the skeptical movement. Unfortunately, that will probably never happen until I cease being a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights, but such is the price of pseudonymity…

Dr. Suzanne Humphries and the International Medical Council on Vaccination: Antivaccine to the core

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a position statement by the International Medical Council on Vaccination (IMCV), which I called, in my own inimitable fashion, The clueless cite the ignorant to argue against vaccines. That's exactly what it was, too, some truly clueless anti-vaccinationists arguing against vaccines and bolstering their argument with a hilariously pathetic list of signatories, among which were noted anti-vaccine activists, chiropractors, homeopaths, and other dubious practitioners totaling only between 80-90. Among those signatories was a woman named Suzanne…

Chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser: On the way to Mexico with his mother?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been blogging regularly about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma who, after one course of chemotherapy in January, refused to undergo any more, citing a faux religion run by a woo-meister naturopath and Native American wannabe called "Chief" Cloudpiler. In reality, it probably wasn't so much belief in this fake religion, which is really no more than an excuse to use laws guaranteeing Native Americans freedom to practice their religions as justification for using peyote and various quackery for disease, but rather…

Homeopathic thuggery bites the host of the next Skeptics' Circle

One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine. So what happens when…

Homeopathy deconstructed in the FASEB Journal

Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter's world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) In any case, I thought it'd be a nice little tidbit, a warmup for tomorrow's Your Friday Dose of Woo, if you will, to discuss it briefly. It starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: Do you think I don't understand the hydrostatic…

Paying for unapproved drugs

One of the handful of key themes that run through this blog day in, day out, week in, week, out, and year in, year out is that science and the application of the scientific method represent the most successful strategy that humans have yet come up with to improve human health. A consequence of this theme, of course, is the consideration of unscientific "therapies," specifically those known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, sometimes, "integrative medicine" (IM). As chronicled here (and many other places), the vast majority of CAM therapies are based on prescientific…

Proto-Fairness? Hints of Moral Thinking in Dogs

Cooperation and conflict are both a part of human society. While a good deal of the academic literature addresses the evolutionary origins of conflict, in recent years there has been an increased focus on the investigation of the evolutionary origins of cooperative behavior. One component of cooperative behavior that might be present in other animals is aversion to inequity. Some scientists have suggested that inequity aversion may itself be the main factor driving the enforcement of cooperation. Put simply, inequity aversion is the resistance among partners to unequal rewards following…

Most significant SF books

Honestly, I'm not sure where this list originated, but somebody came up with this list of "the most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the last 50 years". I was having breakfast with some friends a couple of months ago, and we were musing about what should be in the "SF Canon". This is one person's list, and I suspect others would have other lists. The in thing to do around here (based, at this writing, on the actions of Orac, PZ, John, Joseph, and Bora, is to post the list, posting in bold the ones that I've read. Let's see how my nerd cred does: 1. The Lord of the Rings,…

The deadly power of denial

As I pointed out yesterday before stirring things up a bit, I was up most of the night Sunday night working on a grant (two, actually), and I went full tilt all day yesterday to get it done. Consequently, last night I was in no shape to blog. I chilled. I copied. I picked a rerun. Interestingly, I remembered this post, which was something I did way back in early 2005. the last time I reran it was in 2006; so if you've been reading less than four years, it's new to you, and I'll be back for sure tumorrow. It's also interesting because this post is of a style and subject matter that I don't…

A tale of two unnecessarily doomed aboriginal girls with leukemia

I'm depressed and angry as I write this. The reason for this is simple. I hate it when cancer quacks claim the lives of patients with cancer, particularly patients who were eminently treatable for cure. It's happened again, and it makes me sad. Florida cancer quack Brian Clement has claimed the life of Makayla Sault, an 11 year old Ojibwe girl with leukemia: The entire community of New Credit is in mourning today, following the news of the passing of 11 year old Makayla Sault. The child suffered a stroke on Sunday morning and was unable to recover. Friends and family from across the…

Antivaccine cranks in Michigan: MLive.com gives Mary Tocco a platform

I come across antivaccine editorials all the time. Usually, some editor ignorant of the issues involved is duped by antivaccine arguments or succumbs to the annoying journalistic fallacy (with respect to science) of “telling both sides.” Either that, or the editor has antivaccine proclivities himself. Either way, the result is an op-ed by someone like Barbara Loe Fisher, one of the clown car crew over at at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or one of the drinking moms over at the horribly misnamed “The Thinking Moms’ Revolution.” I’ve seen so many of them and dealt with the same…