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Chemical Hearing Pits Senators Against FDA

By Sarah Vogel On Wednesday, May 14 the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a hearing on Plastics Additives in Consumer Products to discuss the safety of two chemical compounds, bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, in consideration of new legislation and calls for regulatory reform. Both of these chemicals are used in plastics production and have long been known to be endocrine disruptors.  In response to mounting evidence of the harmful health effects of BPA at very low doses of exposure, some manufacturers, the Canadian government, the State of California, and now…

Andrew Wakefield, autism, vaccines and science journals

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure My sciblings at Scienceblogs have done a pretty thorough fisking of the Andrew Wakefield affair.To recap breifly, a paper by Wakefield and others in The Lancet in 1998 raised an alarm that the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was the cause of some cases of childhood autism and a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The incriminated agent was alleged to be measles virus contained in the vaccine (MMR has never contained mercury preservative). The impact was dramatic and this issue became a powerful engine propelling the anti-vaccine…

Stop Toying With the CPSC

UPDATED BELOW Annys Shin of the Washington Post has reported that Dr. Gail Charnley, a well-known corporate product defense expert, is the White Houseâs leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Weâve written extensively here about this beleaguered agency. Finally, after the nation watched helplessly at the recall of millions of lead-contaminated toys, President Bush has evidently decided to replace current Chairman Nancy Nord with someone more competent to safeguard the interests of manufacturers of dangerous products. The Post article lists a few…

Atul Gawande on Resisting Health Care Reform - He Misses a Tactic, Lying!

Atul Gawande, thoughtful as always, writes about the "wicked problem" of healthcare reform and the historical similarity between this battle and previous battles to expand fairness to all of our citizens. Opening with the kind of experiences all physicians have had with tragically-uninsured patients, he emphasizes why this was a needed change: A few days ago, while awaiting the Supreme Court ruling on the Obama health-care law, I called a few doctor friends around the country. I asked them if they could tell me about current patients whose health had been affected by a lack of insurance. “…

Slate parses some crankery

Slate has a series of three articles on what editor Daniel Engber refers to as "the paranoid style". Starting with A crank's progress, sliding into a review of Doubt is their product, and finishing with a spot-on review of Expelled he runs the guantlet of modern denialism. He also happens to hit upon the major commonalities between all pseudoscientists, which of course I find gratifying. For instance, read his description of Berlinski and how he nails the truisms in detecting the false skeptic: Forgive me if I don't pause here to defend the conventional wisdom on evolution and cosmology. (…

Answers Research Journal---HAHAHAHAHA!!!

So, Answers in Genesis cranked out the first issue of its new journal, and with all deliberate speed! It's remarkable. I'm guessing that creation research doesn't take quite as long as, say, real science. The pilot issue is a true testament to the idiocy of the Creation Cult. I guess we have to actually look inside this waste of electrons to see what's going on. While it is true that no scientist with an intact cerebral cortex will take the Answers Research Journal seriously, still, it's hard to ignore. If this is the best shot the Creationist cults can do at making their point then I…

The Heartland Institute Crankfest

There is no way I could let the Heartland Institute's Global Warming conference go by without comment, especially since it's so beautifully conformed to my expectations of what a gathering of cranks would be like. I think DeSmogBlog's coverage has been the best. But back to my expectations, we have experts of dubious quality speaking to a group of people that clearly have no ability to judge sources (from the WSJ ): Given that line-up, and the Heartland Institute's stated mission--"to discover and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems"--two of the presentations…

Guest post: Will new FDA guidelines reduce threat from superbugs?

Guest post by Tim Fothergill, Ph.D. In January of this year the British Chief Medical Officer urged her government to add  threat posed by superbugs to the official list of "Apocalypses to Worry About" along with catastrophic terrorist attacks and massive flooding. With typical British understatement, its actual name is the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies but a very stark picture was painted of a post-antibiotic world in which routine operations, such as hip replacements, could prove fatal. In September, The Centers for Disease Control in the US issued a similar statement which…

HIV In-Home Testing Kits: Increased Awareness or Increased Problems?

Fifth of five student guest posts by Jonathan Yuska The saying, “The more you know, the more you can control,” is no more meaningful than when used in the context of HIV detection and prevention. Public health advocates endlessly stress the need for knowing one’s status; and one would assume that any way in which the most amount of people can be tested would be beneficial for the population1. The Food and Drug Administration shared this same idea when they overwhelmingly approved the first ever over-the-counter (OTC) HIV testing kit in 20052; which in theory, sounds like a promising way to…

Bacteriophages to Fight Bacteria: Is this the Beginning of the End?

This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease. By David Massaquoi Is this the Beginning of the end of antibiotic resistant problem or just another scientific false hope of eradicating microorganisms that have co-existed with humans for millions of years? In the days before antibiotics, some researchers saw bacteriophages, viruses that can seek out and destroy bacteria, as a promising candidate for fighting infections. Now, as more organisms develop resistance to existing antibiotics, phage research is finding new favor. (More after the jump...) At the Society…

Fecal transplants to cure Clostridium difficile infection

In my field, many things that cause the average man-on-the-street to get a bit squeamish or squicked are rather commonplace. My own studies include two types of bacteria that are carried rectally in humans (and other animals), so I spend an absurd amount of time thinking about, well, shit, and the lifeforms that inhabit it and collectively make up our normal gut flora. The vast majority of these species don't harm us at all, and many are even beneficial: priming our immune system; assisting in digestion; and filling niches that could be colonized by their nastier bacterial brethren. It…

Would you give your baby someone else's breast milk?

"Wet nursing," or the practice of allowing a woman other than the mother of a child to provide milk to an infant, has been practiced for millenia. Two hundred years ago, wet nursing was common for a variety of reasons. Upper-class families could hire a wet nurse to enable the mother to more quickly become pregnant again, ensuring adequate nutrition for the newborn infant without the associated decrease in fertility that accompanies breast-feeding. In middle class families, employing a wet nurse allowed the mother to return to her job in the factory or in the field. This practice began…

Cintas defends safety record despite $2.78 million OSHA penalty

Mr. Eleazar Torres-Gomez, 46, was killed at an Oklahoma Cintas laundry plant on March 6, 2007, when he was dragged into an industrial dryer because of an unguarded conveyor.  Federal OSHA investigated the fatality and, this week, proposed a $2.78 million penalty for, among other things, 42 willful violations of its lockout/tagout standard. OSHA's Asst. Secretary stated: "Plant management at the Cintas Tulsa laundry facility ignored safety and health rules that could have prevented the death of the employee." The CEO of Cintas, Scott Farmer, expressed the familiar: "Any accident is one too…

Law & Order? Presidential Candidate Hires Former Tobacco Flack

By David Michaels Chris Cillizza of WashingtonPost.com's The Fix blog reports that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is "growing more and more serious about a run for president" - in fact, he's chosen a "campaign manager in waiting." Tom Collamore, a former vice president of public affairs at Altria, has been leading the behind-the scenes organization efforts for a Thompson presidential candidacy and will be intimately involved when (not if) the former senator decides to announce a bid. Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris (PM), which was behind many of the tobacco…

The Testing Myth and NCLB

Another credulous article on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law appears today in the Washington Post. As someone who knows many teachers who have had experience with similar stupid laws in Virginia, and the history of the Bush administration pushing for these kinds of laws based on the "Texas Education Miracle", I'm far more skeptical about any real gains in learning as a result of standardized testing. But first, you have to understand what Bush, and his education secretary Rod Paige, really did as governor of Texas for education (take a guess), and how standardized testing is a cynical…

What was that skull?

Well done and thanks to everyone who had a go at identifying the mystery skull, and congrats to TJ, Jorge Velez-Juarbe, Mark Lees and others: it was indeed a glyptodont, specifically a glyptodontine glyptodontid and, most specifically of all, Glyptodon clavipes. So much for posting the answer on Sunday night - I've been busy but, if you feel in need of a good, lengthy Naish article you can always nip over to SV-POW! and read the piece I recently produced on theories about sauropod pneumaticity. There's an awful lot that you could say about glyptodonts: their armour, tails, limbs, and limb…

Interesting Parallels: The Leader Election Problem and Notch Receptors

Yesterday at Pharyngula, PZ posted a description of his favorite signaling pathway in developmental biology, the [Notch system.][notch] Notch is a cellular system for selecting one cell from a collection of essentially indistinguishable cells, so that that one cell can take on some different role. What I found striking was that the problem that Notch solves is extremely similar to one of the classic problems of distributed systems that we study in computer science, called the leader-election problem; and that the mechanism used by Notch is remarkably similar to one of the classic leader-…

Causeless Math from Dembski and Friend

Over at his blog, William Dembski, my least-favorite pathetic excuse for a mathematician, [has cited an article][dembski] written by one John Davison about the theory of evolution. According to Dembski, this article explains "why the naked emperor still lingers"; that is, why the theory of evolution is still around even though it's so obviously wrong. (Update: I originally typed "Paul Davison" instead of "John Davison", I don't know why. Any "Paul Davison"s out there, sorry for associating your name with this dreck. Additionally, the article is posted on Dembski's blog, but it wasn't posted…

From Beautiful to Twisted in One Syntactic Step: False

Today's friday programming language insanity is a tad different. I'm going to look at another twisted stack-based language. I've got a peculiar fondness for these buggers, because back in the day, I was a serious Forth addict. One of the ideas that's actually come up in serious programming languages in the last few years is creating a sort of cross between functional languages and stack-based languages, producing what are known as concatenative languages. An excellent example of an extremely powerful and useful member of this family is called Factor, by Slava Pestov. But serious useful…

Stupidity from our old friend Sal

Over at [Dispatches][dispatches], Ed Brayton has been shredding my old friend Sal Cordova. Ed does a great job arguing that intelligent design is a PR campaign, and not a field of scientific research. Ed does a fine job with the argument; you should definitely click on over to take a look. But Sal showed up in the comments to defend himself, and made some statements that I just can't resist mocking for their shallow stupidity and utter foolishness. [dispatches]: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/01/answering_cordova_on_ids_goa… Let's start with a mangled metaphor from [here][comment-…

What do Great Tits Reveal about the Genetics of Personality?

tags: evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, molecular ecology, personality, novelty seeking, exploratory behavior, dopamine receptor, dopamine receptor D4 gene, DRD4 gene polymorphism, ornithology, birds, Great Tit, Parus major, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper Bold or cautious? Individuals with a particular gene variant are very curious -- but only in some populations. Image: Henk Dikkers. Research suggests that personality variations are heritable in humans and other animal species, and there are many hypotheses as to why differences in personality…

The Lark-Mouse and the Prometheus-Mouse

Two interesting papers came out last week [from the Archives - click on the clock logo to see the original post], both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene inserted into the mouse was a human gene, though the method was different and the question was different: Turning a Mouse Into A Lark The first paper (Y. Xu, K.L. Toh, C.R. Jones, J.-Y. Shin, Y.-H. Fu, and L.J. PtáÄek Modeling of a Human Circadian Mutation Yields Insights into Clock Regulation by PER2. Cell, Vol 128, 59-70, 12 January 2007) is…

Elephants’ wings

Once upon a time, four blind men were walking in the forest, and they bumped into an elephant. Moe was in front, and found himself holding the trunk. "It has a tentacle," he said. "I think we have found a giant squid!" Larry bumped into the side of the elephant. "It's a wall," he said, "A big, bristly wall." Curly, at the back, touched the tail. "It's nothing to worry about, nothing but a piece of rope dangling in the trail." Eagletosh saw the interruption as an opportunity to sit in the shade beneath a tree and relax. "It is my considered opinion," he said, "that whatever it is has feathers…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 21 new articles in PLoS ONE 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, 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: Heterochronic Shift in Hox-Mediated Activation of Sonic hedgehog Leads to Morphological Changes during Fin Development: We explored the molecular mechanisms of morphological transformations of vertebrate paired fin/…

Post-publication Peer-review in PLoS-ONE, pars premiere

Why is the letter P the most useful for alliterative titles? But back to the substance. One thing that bugged me for a long time is that I often see on blogs or hear in person a sentiment that "there are no comments on PLoS ONE". Yet I spend quite some time every week opening and reading all the new comments so I KNOW they are there and that there is quite a bunch of them already. Why the difference in perception? Is it due to the predictable distribution (a few papers get lots of comments, most get one or none, just like blog posts)? So, when we saw this nice analysis of commenting on…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

There are a bunch of cool new articles in PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases today. Take a look: The Dirty War Index: Statistical Issues, Feasibility, and Interpretation: In this issue of PLoS Medicine, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks and Michael Spagat propose a new quantitative tool [1] in the emerging field of human security sciences [2]. Quantitative data about people's insecurity can lead to objective knowledge about many of the contexts of violence in the world today. Thus developing quantitative tools for use in this domain is important. Hicks and Spagat's tool…

The Lark-Mouse and the Prometheus-Mouse

Two interesting papers came out last week [from the Archives - click on the clock logo to see the original post], both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene inserted into the mouse was a human gene, though the method was different and the question was different: Turning a Mouse Into A Lark The first paper (Y. Xu, K.L. Toh, C.R. Jones, J.-Y. Shin, Y.-H. Fu, and L.J. PtáÄek Modeling of a Human Circadian Mutation Yields Insights into Clock Regulation by PER2. Cell, Vol 128, 59-70, 12 January 2007) is…

VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons

No other aspect of behavioral biology is as well understood at the molecular level as the mechanism that generates and sustains circadian rhythms. If you are following science in general, or this blog in particular, you are probably familiar with the names of circadian clock genes like per, tim, clk, frq, wc, cry, Bmal, kai, toc, doubletime, rev-erb etc. The deep and detailed knowledge of the genes involved in circadian clock function has one unintended side-effect, especially for people outside the field. If one does not stop and think for a second, it is easy to fall under the impression…

On Atheism

Are humans hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen? Certainly, many great thinkers believe this is the case. "A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies," Charles Darwin wrote in his book,The Descent of Man, "seems to be universal." Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. According to anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features -- belief in a noncorporeal God or gods…

The Bi | Polar Puzzle

tags: bipolar disorder, manic-depression, mental health, mental illness, behavior Image: Gerald Slota, The New York Times Magazine. A couple days ago, I heard an interview with Jennifer Egan on WNYC about her upcoming article in tomorrow's New York Magazine about bipolar disorder, often known as manic-depressive illness, "The Bi | Polar Puzzle." It's long but well-written and definitely worth reading. In this touching and informative piece, Egan primarily addresses several questions; whether bipolar disorder exists in children, what it looks like and whether children with undiagnosed/…

The Escalating Coevolutionary Arms Race between Cuckoos and their Hosts

tags: researchblogging.org, begging calls, brood parasitism, coevolution, learning, social shaping, ornithology, Horsfield's Bronze-Cuckoo, Chalcites basalis, Chrysococcyx basalis Horsfield's Bronze-Cuckoo, Chalcites (Chrysococcyx) basalis, Capertee Valley, NSW, Australia, September 2003. Image: Aviceda [larger view]. Brood parasites are birds, fish or insects that deceive unrelated animals of the same species or different species to care for their offspring. By doing so, the parasitic parent is relieved of the energetic demands of constructing a nest and raising its young to…

Extinction

Everyone knows that the dinosaurs went extinct after a giant meteorite smashed into earth 65 million years ago, creating a huge dent in the planet's surface just off the Yucatan peninsula, but did you know that there was an earlier, even more dramatic, mass extinction event? That apocalyptic event occurred approximately 252 million years ago, at the Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary, and it wiped out nearly 95% of all living species on earth, but unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction, the PT mass extinction cause(s) remain mysterious. In his book, Extinction: How Life Nearly Ended…

Pluto: round and round

So... the ad hoc sub-subcommittee of the standing subcommittee for the Naming of Names has reported out: the Federation of People Who Believe No Really Important Discoveries are Made West of the Mississippi are reeling in defeat, while the Alliance of the Crusade for Consistency is handed a token superficial victory. Millions of elementary school teachers, and their pupils, are in tears. A Good Day for Science, indeed. Phil has the lowdonw and here is the official word Various ScienceBloggers chime in, here and here and here Well, it is all over but the voting, which comes later this week.…

Big Family Rules

I get to play ringmaster to  the Greatest Show on Earth - my own personal family farm circus with at least three rings of fun going on at any given time, and I wouldn't have it any other way. The circus varies a lot in size (I recently overheard myself saying that it didn't matter how many people came to a celebration at my place, that I can perfectly well cook for 40 as well as 20, which is actually correct), with a baseline population of 8 (Me, Eric, Eli 13, Simon 11, Isaiah 9, Asher 7, Baby Z. 8mos and Phil-the-housemate) plus N additional members provided by foster care.  I've come to…

My connection to Sonic Hedgehog

Some more pure science from guest blogger LisaJ: Everyone seems to love a little Sonic Hedgehog around here. Whenever PZ discusses another function that this fascinating gene is capable of, much excitement ensues in the comment posts. So I thought I would take this opportunity to talk a bit about what I study, and how my seemingly unrelated favourite protein pathway is also connected to the Shh gene. The main protein that I study was originally identified through studies of a pediatric eye cancer, called Retinoblastoma, as loss of function of this protein (termed the Retinoblastoma protein…

No NASA Conference Travel in 2009

A literal reading of the NASA Authorization Act implies a significant cutback of astronomy conferences in 2009. Warning e-mail, pending clarification, has gone out, and people have already done some canceling of planned travel. Something bad snuck into the H.R. 6063 NASA Authorization Act (2008) [static link to pdf] during Senate/House conference (see original text here). Specifically section 1121. SEC. 1121. LIMITATION ON FUNDING FOR CONFERENCES. (a) IN GENERAL- There are authorized to be appropriated not more than $5,000,000 for any expenses related to conferences, including conference…

Speciation in Birds

tags: Speciation in Birds, Trevor Price, book review, evolution, birds The question of what is a species and how they arise has generated numerous discussions and tremendous controversy throughout the decades. This interest is more than academic, as any bird watcher will tell you since the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) routinely splits one species into two or lumps two species into one, thereby wreaking havoc with many birders' "life lists"; that master list of species seen that is kept by each birder. More than once, I have heard birders question the validity of one or another of the…

What Apple isn't telling us: Working conditions in Apple's "robust, flexible supply chain"

by Elizabeth Grossman The morning after President Obama's State of the Union speech that featured plans for reinvigorating U.S. manufacturing, Marketplace Morning Report asked former Obama Administration economic advisor Jared Bernstein why a company like Apple doesn't create more jobs in the U.S. "Well," replied Bernstein, "because the infrastructure for consumer electronics - particularly the assembly for consumer electronics - for many decades has been building up in Asia. And they just have a robust, flexible supply chain there that we simply don't have when it comes to consumer…

Who's exposed - and what can they do about it? Biomonitoring for consumer products and workplaces

by Elizabeth Grossman "If I say pollution, the images that first come to mind are likely to be smokestacks, waste pipes, an accident or a disaster. But increasingly, environmental health researchers are focusing on sources that are much closer to home, like toys and beauty products and food packaging and cleaners and furniture. These are now sources of chemicals of interest," said Julia Brody, director of the Silent Spring Institute introducing a session on biomonitoring at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held recently in Washington, DC. "The…

Dangerous chemicals, dangerous technology – Industry’s persistent push to protect asbestos

Asbestos has long been the poster-child for the United States’ failure to adequately protect Americans from hazardous chemicals. Yet despite its notoriety, asbestos remains in use, exposing, not only workers but also their families, communities and in some cases, consumers to a known and deadly carcinogen. It’s been widely hoped – even expected – that the updated Toxics Substance Control Act (TSCA) would finally address this problem. But as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gets to work implementing the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act (LCSA), a battle is shaping up around asbestos…

Study: Nearly half of U.S. counties now home to ticks that transmit Lyme disease

It’s been nearly two decades since the last publication of a nationwide survey on the distribution of blacklegged ticks — the primary transmitters of Lyme disease. That survey, released in 1998, reported the tick in 30 percent of U.S. counties. Today, a new study using similar surveillance methods has found the tick in more than 45 percent of counties. “These kinds of changes tend to be gradual,” study co-author Rebecca Eisen, a research biologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, told me. “But when you see the cumulative change over 20…

Donald Rasmussen: Coal miners’ physician, humble man

During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging.  We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them, originally posted on July 27, 2015: by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH The occupational health community, coal miners, their families and labor advocates are mourning the loss of physician Donald Rasmussen, 87. For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic. A lengthy story by John Blankenship…

San Francisco passes nation’s first Retail Workers Bill of Rights, addressing erratic scheduling and part-time work

The week of midterm exams is stressful for any college student. For San Francisco State student Michelle Flores, it was another stress-filled example of the unfair conditions she and millions of other retail workers face on a regular basis. Flores, a 20-year-old labor studies and public policy undergrad, is a cashier at a national grocery store chain and usually works a 24-hour week, though she’d like to work more. Just before midterms, she found out her supervisor expected her to work 30 hours the same week as her exams — and he gave her just two days notice. “I said I'd work them,” she said…

STACLU's Depth of Analysis

Perhaps I should say lack of depth, since, like most political partisans, they rarely look beyond the surface level of immediate reaction to really think about an issue. This post is a textbook example, where John Bambenek declares a simple double standard: Compare and contrast these two cases: The first, a scandal-ridden New Jersey Senator who was running for reelection abruptly resigns and drops out of the race 35 days before the election. Litigation ensues and the court decides that it should override the law under the concerns to ensure a "full and fair ballot choice" for the voters. The…

Answering Ancient Brit on Thought Crimes

Ancient Brit left a comment on a thread below, and the answer became so long and involved - and important, in my view - that I decided to move it up here to its own post. He wrote: I find it interesting that while Europe has exercised moderate control over hate groups, America has not, and is fast becoming a safe haven (and recruitment center) for all manner of nasty antisocial movements. That doesn't mean that all Americans believe that it's OK to be racist, or misogynist, or anti-Semitic, but it does mean that dangerous ideas flourish and prosper instead of withering and dying. What you…

Top Eleven: Alain Aspect

The final and most recent of the Top Eleven is an experiment that goes right to the heart of the weirdness inherent in quantum mechanics. Who: Alain Aspect (1947-present), a French physicist. (Again, Wikipedia is a let-down, but CNRS has useful information.) When: Around 1982 (there are several experiments involved, but the 1982 one is cited by most people). What: His group performed the first experimental tests of Bell's Inequality, which shows that the predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be explained by a "local hidden variable" theory. Explaining that will take some space, so I'll…

Expletive Delighted?

More politics, sorry. Still, if you want science, RC and J+J are blogging AGU. But CIP is delighted with Obama's speech on the economy. I'm less so; the comment there from Wolfgang (He always gave great speeches... this was one reason he won in 2008. The problem is that great speeches are not sufficient once the elcetion is over...) looks all too correct. But there is far more to talk about than that, so... [Note: these quotes are heavily cut to compress them; please check the originals. But I don't think I've altered the sense.] For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered…

Perfect Numbers

I'll return to my Dawkins series later in the week. But after all our exertions recently trying to resolve the mysteries of the universe, I find myself in the mood for a straight math post. So, inspired by some comments from this post, let's talk about perfect numbers. A number is said to be perfect if it is equal to the sum of its proper, positive divisors. By “proper” divisor we mean a divisor not equal to the number itself. For example, the proper divisors of 20 are 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10. But since 1+2+4+5+10=22, we see that 20 is not perfect. On the other hand, the proper divisors of…

Diversity Is Frustrating: Cartoon Polygon Physics

Back in December, The Parable of the Polygons took social media by storm. It's a simple little demonstration of how relatively small biases can lead to dramatic segregation effects, using cute cartoon polygons. You should go read it, if you haven't already. I'll wait. This post isn't really about that. I mean, it is, but it's using it for something dramatically different than the intended purpose of the post. You see, I am such a gigantic dork that when I looked at their toy model, the first thing that came to mind was physics. (And, in fact, I sat on this post topic for the better part of a…

Ask Ethan #19: Why does the Milky Way look curved?

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” -Douglas Adams Even though our main blog has moved, I'm so glad that the questions and suggestions have still been pouring in, because it's time for another entry in our Ask Ethan series! Today's question comes from professional physicist Marty Olsson, who asks: I have been bothered for a long time why the Milky Way looks curved, sort of like…