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Crazy, obsessed, weird, perverse

Sometimes those are good descriptors. I read a happy story for a change this morning: it's about Arunachalam Muruganantham, an Indian man who embarked on a long crusade to make…sanitary napkins. Perhaps you laugh. Perhaps you get a little cranky at a guy who rushes in to meddle in women's concerns. And there's some good reason to feel that way: he starts out with embarrassing levels of ignorance. He fashioned a sanitary pad out of cotton and gave it to Shanthi [his wife], demanding immediate feedback. She said he'd have to wait for some time - only then did he realise that periods were…

Mount Biodome

Chad and I both listen to ESPN's Mike and Mike in the mornings. The last couple of days they've been trying to figure out what four athletes belong on the Mount Rushmore of sports (they settled on Muhammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky). While I was sitting around wondering if they would even mention Pele, Chad thought it would be cool to come up with a Mount Rushmore of Science. I'm not going to tackle such a broad topic. Instead, I ask who belongs on a Mount Rushmore of Biology, which I'd like to call Mount Biodome. My suggestions are below the fold -- and, no,…

One Last Chance for the House to Show They Support Science

Our plan to have the House Budget Committee approve an amendment to increase the NIH budget failed. Our next chance to ensure the NIH budget is increased will occur on the House floor. If you have yet to contact your US Representative about supporting life-sciences research, please do so by visiting this site. The following comes from an email from the Genetics Society of America. Your Voice Still Needs to Be Heard The House Budget Committee voted down the amendment offered by Rep. Rosa DeLauro that would have increased health and education funding in the House Budget Resolution by $7…

Welcome to evolgen at ScienceBlogs

Hello again to my long time evolgen readers, and nice to meet you to the first timers who have found the new site. For my regular readers, this, for all intents and purposes, is the new evolgen. The old site is still around and will act as an archive of my previous evolgen posts, but if you happen to visit it you will notice some changes. It is now known as "Clash, Culture and Science" and this new incarnation of evolgen at ScienceBlogs will act as the new CONVERGENCE OF EVOLUTION AND GENETICS. Read my "farewell post" for more details. As for my new readers that have discovered me via…

Another cancer quack

That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called "Atavistic Chemotherapy". It's amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You'll never guess what it is. He's treating cancer patients with antibiotics. The drugs used in combination have been selected based on the principles of "Atavistic…

These Are the People at Your Departmental Seminar

Do you ever sit in a boring departmental seminar and scope out the other folks in the room? You'll pick up some odd behaviors. Like the guy picking his nose -- gross! Or the secret couple that can't be open about their relationship because it breaks some university policy sitting a bit too close to one another. Well, here are a few folks that you'll probably see in every departmental seminar: The nodder: This guy affirms every part of the talk with a nod. The background information -- he gets it. The data -- he gets it. The conclusions drawn from arm waving and rampant speculation -- he…

Myth: multicellular life arose in the Cambrian

Creationists are much vested in the idea of "suddenly" -- they love the idea of inserting the fingersnap of God into every abrupt transition. This is why they are infatuated with the Big Bang and the Cambrian Explosion, and why they flirted with the idea of renaming "Intelligent Design" to "Sudden Origins" theory. If something had no antecedents, no gradual build up, well then, we have to explain it with "God did it!". Unfortunately, the media plays along with it. I found a bit of scientific misinformation on the Raw Story -- such obvious stupidity that anyone with any basic training in…

The Not-So-Royal We

Finally, using a series of related MMEJ substrates, we investigated the inhibitory effect of Pku70 on fission yeast MMEJ unraveled in this study and the impact of both length and position of the microhomologous region on MMEJ efficiency. That quote comes at the end of the introduction of this paper entitled "Microhomology-Mediated End Joining in Fission Yeast Is Repressed by Pku70 and Relies on Genes Involved in Homologous Recombination" by Anabelle Decottignies. It's unremarkable as far as passages from scientific papers go, but I chose it for a reason. The paper from which the quote is…

Now we know how to make the IDists dance in their petticoats: blaspheme.

The latest panty-twisting at Uncommon Descent is over the Blasphemy Challenge. The poor dears are so concerned about all the heretics damning themselves that DaveScot is moved to weep and pray over them, and William Dembski writes a letter to Richard Dawkins asking him why he doesn't expand the challenge to torment the Moslems (note that Dawkins is not responsible for the Blasphemy Challenge, has nothing at all to do with it, and hasn't promoted it, so it's rather peculiar of Dembski to act as if he is the Grand Overlord of All Atheists). This wouldn't be worth following, except that I think…

Haiti Cholera Toll: Stricken - 11,000, Dead - 750+

Over eleven thousand Haitians have been infected with cholera, and over 700 have died. The epidemic is worsening very quickly. Over 80 of the dead have died within the last 24 hours as of this writing. The resources needed to deal with this are not available, apparently because cholera in Haiti is not as interesting or sympathy garnering as an earthquake in Haiti. From Medecines Sans Frontiers: Over the past three days, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical teams supporting Haitian Ministry of Public Health facilities and working in their own independent medical structures in Haiti's…

Dogs and Cats in Medical Research

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of federally regulated sources for dogs and cats used in medical research, training, an testing, in the US. They are labeled, unambiguously, A and B. A-class sources are breeders that produce animals for use in research. B-class sources, also called "Random source," provide animals, usually adults, that are not bred, but just acquired somehow (more or less randomly?) and kept for a while, and sold to research facilities. Random source dogs and cats are not bred by these dealers. (These are USDA regulatory categories.) According to a report produced by…

Suzanne Somers versus Christina Applegate in a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy fantasy cage match!

Earlier today, I did a rather extensive post about a particularly ghoulish attempt to exploit the story of a woman with cancer, in this case Christina Applegate. It turns out that Mike Adams isn't the only woo-meister looking to capitalize on Ms. Applegate's misfortune, You just knew it had to happen, but Thighmaster, Bioidentical Stem Cell Huckster Suzanne Somers has gotten in on the act. Apparently she's penned an open letter to Applegate that was published in People: Dear Christina, Cancer is scary, and lonely. You can't ask anyone to make decisions for you because it's just too heavy.…

To the Bat Cave! David Kirby's on the loose in the U.S.

Fellow skeptical doc PalMD informs me that apparently a new blogger, who happens to be a law student at NYU, discovered that his school had invited antivaccinationist-apologist supreme, David Kirby, to speak at NYU on June 26. In response, antivaccinationists, including David Kirby himself and antivaccinationist crank extraordinaire Clifford G. Miller himself, the man who apparently invited David Kirby to befoul the fair city of London and even the halls of Parliament with his antivaccinationist nonsense, has appeared. Much hilarity ensues as every antivaccinationist canard known to…

Bible science

If you're a fan of mangled philosophy and patent falsehoods, you really must read the Biblical view of science. It's crazily disconnected from anything close to describing how science actually works. What then is the Biblical view of science? Science enables us to fulfill the mandate of Genesis 1:28: "Then God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.' " Science gives us directions for doing things, or "…

Obama releases detailed plan for science.

This is big news for science. Yesterday, the Obama campaign released their most detailed plan to date for how he will manage US government science and science policy. The 11 page plan (pdf) is a significant improvement on the previous "fact sheet" that they had up, which was severely lacking in detail. Somehow this story got buried by the letter from 61 Nobel Laureates endorsing Obama. (The timing of the two was clearly planned, but I am obviously not the only one who missed it.) There is a lot of information in the plan, but right off the bat I noticed that he has now committed to…

Creativity in the Classroom

There are many ways that the Art of Science Learning manifests at our different institutions. This is my story, and one example of what this can look like. The concept of art and science integration became a laboratory for two institutions located in San Francisco, located right across the street from each other. Education staff at the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, explored the connection of art and science through the similarity between common themes, the process of development, the way information is conveyed, and the…

Al Gore on Censorship and the "Prison of Illusions"

Earlier today at the 2006 American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in San Francisco, the former Vice President introduced himself, "I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States." Those who have seen "An Inconvenient Truth" will know the line, which predictably drew laughs. However, today's lecture, Climate Change: The Role of Science and the Media in Policymaking was stripped down and refocused. There were no PowerPoint slides, no Macintosh computer, no cherry pickers, just a man in a dark blue suit, a podium, and literally thousands of scientists hanging on his every…

Evolutionary Bridges

Sam McDougle joins us from re:COGNITION at The Beautiful Brain. Sam splits this time between behavioral neuroscience research at the University of Pennsylvania, playing fiddle in an Appalachian string-band, and drumming in an indie rock trio. In my recent career as an undergraduate, I noticed a curious phenomenon–around my junior year, dorm rooms across the campus were suddenly spending Friday nights captivated by the wonders of the natural world, led along by David Attenborough’s poised intonations. BBC’s Planet Earth box set would soon be as ubiquitous in 18-24 year olds’ DVD collections…

Stranger than science fiction

You know those guys in high school who never learned to talk to girls? The ones who didn't bother with acne medication, sported glasses that appeared to have been passed down from a long-dead uncle, and knew an alarming amount of Star Trek trivia? Well, apparently, they've all grown up and become neuroscientists. It's the only possible explanation. No one else could have come up with the idea of teaching a disembodied brain to fly an F-22 fighter jet. That's right, folks--a group of neuroscientists in Florida grew a brain in a Petri dish and taught it how to fly. They extracted 25,000 neural…

Are you a 99214 with 250.02, 401.1, and 272.2?

When I see a patient at the office, I spend time developing trust, forming a therapeutic alliance, thinking through their physical complaints, examining them, and applying the best evidence to formulating a plan for maintaining their health. It's a lot of fun. Less fun is the part where I try to get paid. To bill an insurance company, I must use numeric diagnostic codes that best fit what I'm seeing, and I must pick a code representing a level of service, that is, how hard I worked. The diagnostic codes are referred to as ICD-9 codes, and the service codes are called E/M codes. Not all ICD-…

RJ Rummel vs the Lancet study

You would think that after all this time, all possible erroneous arguments against the Lancet study would have been made, but folks keep coming up with new ones. R.J. Rummel has come up with some new ones. Unlike many of the critics, Rummel has read the study; but unfortunately he has badly misunderstood it. Rummel writes: The pre-invasion statistics were compiled by Saddam's Ministry of Health. There are questions one must ask of such a source that the Lancet researchers do inadequately. Did the ministry include murders or massacres by the Iraqi regime, such as in prison…

The War on St Patrick's Day?

This fellow, Bob Averill, is a Portland atheist who was attending the Art Institute there. You won't believe what happened to him recently. In the classroom that day, Averill says one young woman was talking about her belief in energy layers and astral beings. "I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer," Averill wrote in notes to himself later that day. "In the interest of bringing my own view to the discussion, I began to ask her how she knew these things. Again I know all too well that people can be sensitive about their…

Hox in the Box: Evo-Devo on TV

A couple of posts back, I plugged the Spore game a bit, and I see that proprietor of Pharyngula asks if anyone has played the game yet? PZ shrugs his skeptical shoulders and says insouciantly (well, maybe...I just like the adverb): I've played with the creature creator, which is actually rather fun...but it's really just the most elaborate version of Mr Potatohead ever designed. What I've seen of the game itself puts me off a bit, though. It's not going to teach one single thing about evolution, and actually teaches several things that are anti-evolutionary. It's a design toy, not any kind…

College road trip: off the cuff mentoring

My elder kid and I returned yesterday from Madison, Wisconsin where he spent a couple of days taking placement tests and becoming oriented and advised. Poor guy. He is in some danger of being pegged as a reviled "Coastie." . Fortunately, he belongs to an uber-nerd species whose habits and nature are a far cry from the Westchester preppie ilk which has invaded Mad City like so much purple loosestrife in a Wisconsin wetland. He has legitimate claim to Cheesehead status by virtue of having been popped out of the ol' womb at Madison General. However, he is known to wear New Zealand Ugg…

Some Semi-Random Observations

The question has been raised as to whether or not organized religious fervor will eventually win out over the Enlightenment ideals of humanistic atheism, and if it does, the consequence of America devolving into a theocratic hegemony. On their side, the humanist-atheist camp operates from a position of empiricism and rationality which appears to be a huge plus. On the other hand, as I see it, the main practical-structural difference between the devoutly religious and atheists like me is that atheists do not have weekly meetings or door-to-door membership drives. Researchers at IBM and the…

How Do Blogs Help Recruit Women and Minorities in the Geosciences?

UPDATE: Pat Campbell has asked that if you did take the survey initially when it was returning 404 errors, and you subsequently re-took it, drop her an email and she will send you cookies! She has promised to send cookies to the first 10 of my readers who had to retake the survey, if you let her know by email. I've had her cookies. They are great! If you got the 404 error this is a nice incentive to retake - just do so and then drop Pat an email : campbell AT campbell-kibler DOT com UPDATE: If you took this survey right after I first posted this entry and got a 404 error when you tried…

Happy Birthday

198 years ago, Charles "Chuck D." Darwin was born to an English physician who had married into the family famous for Wedgwood china. Halfway around the world, in a log cabin on the frontier, young Abraham Lincoln was born. Those two births changed the world, bringing forth a set of ideas that changed how we all see the world. Darwin's idea was simplicity itself, once he recognized it. Animals and plants all differ, and those differences are passed from generation to generation. Some of that variation improves an animal or plant's prospects in life, other variations limit the prospects of…

If only

If only we had some sort of way to detect design. It would be so handy. The DI complaints blog is up in arms over a claim of plagiarism against Judge Jones. Not for his use of proposed findings of fact and law in his ruling in the Dover trial, but over this passage from his Dickinson College Commencement Address: As has been often written, our Founding Fathers were children of The Enlightenment. So influenced, they possessed a great confidence in an individual's ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the exercise of his or her reason. And that reason was…

Point-counterpoint, or Why does Dick Cheney hate Republican voters?

Democracy Corps just released a major study of 49 House districts currently held by Republicans. The Ryun-Boyda race is not yet in the top 49 races, but pollster Stan Greenberg and strategist James Carville are thinking that Democrats need to challenge more than just those 49. Stan Greenberg says that "there've got to be seats beyond these 49," most of which are in a band from Connecticut to Indiana. The Democratic challenger has a 2 point advantage over the incumbent in the bottom tier of races, the ones that the pollsters considered a stretch originally. Especially interesting is the…

Tennessee twit gets brief moment in the limelight of Fox

Kurt Zimmerman is pissed off. He's not a very bright guy, and he doesn't know much about biology or history, and he's extremely annoyed that not only is the local school teaching his kids stuff he didn't know, but they're actually telling them that his sources of information are wrong. You see, the only level of education we're allowed to raise children to is the Kurt Zimmerman level…which is a little scary. I was kind of hoping that sending my kids off to school would produce progeny who are smarter than me, and now I learn that they're only supposed to produce kids who are dumber than Kurt…

You know me, or you think you do

Many thanks to everyone who introduced themselves on this blog over the weekend. (If you missed it, don't be shy. Feel free to add to the thread.) Community is a major part of what science blogging is all about and I certainly appreciate all the questions, comments, and criticisms left here since I started last October. Hell, without help and advice from many of you I definitely would not have achieved what I have this past year alone, and I think it is wonderful how science bloggers can help each other. Following ScienceWoman's lead, then, I thought it was only right to post my own quick bio…

They got Charlton Heston? Now I'm convinced

Although creationists try hard to be media-savvy, relying on rhetoric to make their arguments, I can't help but laugh at who qualifies as a star in creationist circles. While documentaries about evolution often feature people like Liam Neeson and Kenneth Branagh, z-listers like Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein are the best creationists can get, apparently. Apparently Charlton Heston did his part for the creationist cause, too, as I discovered while surfing YouTube this morning; A planet where apes evolved from men dinosaurs lived with humans? According to the "scientists," yes, even though the…

Why blog?

Aw, man. Just when I promised myself I'd cut down on the meta stuff along comes the latest "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question; There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research? I should probably make it clear at the outset that I would not consider myself an academic, a scientist, or ascribe any other title to myself that makes me sound like a professional. I have no ongoing scientific research project that this blog feeds off…

Details about The Boneyard #20

On May 17 I'll be hosting the 20th edition of The Boneyard, but rather than just collecting a group of links from whatever might happen to pop up on the web I've decided to do something a little different. I want to run a contest for anyone who might be interested, and the theme of the competition is going to be "Meeting a prehistoric creature." You could write some fiction about coming across a dinosaur in the woods or a Neanderthal on a subway, relate a real-life experience digging up fossils, talk about an early trip to the museum, or anything else that might come to mind on the theme of…

Extinction of the dinosaurs according to Lovejoy

I'm nearly finished with Lucy, but before I close the book I thought I would share Owen Lovejoy's hypothesis about the extinction of dinosaurs as related by Don Johansen. Keep in mind that the book was first published in 1982 when ideas about what killed the dinosaurs were legion; [Also, for some of the terminology here to make sense, organisms are sometimes referred to being r-selected or k-selected in terms of their reproductive strategies. A r-selected organism produces lots of offspring with little investment in each, like corals that release egg & sperm in great quantities.…

Christmas Carnage: 3 Tigers Slaughtered for TCM

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was likely behind the slaughter of three Amur Tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) , an adult female and two cubs, involving two separate incidents in Chongqing, China during the past week. Last Thursday an adult female tiger was found by park officials, the criminals tranquilizing the animal before butchering it; they decapitated it and took the skin and legs, as well. The cubs were found today in a freezer in the park ticketing office, which makes me suspicious whether park officials were involved in the killings, and I don't doubt that similar incidents will…

Science and Nature: "Real" journals?

[Note: Wow; apparently I hit a bit of a nerve, but that's a good thing. I hope the comments keep coming in. Like many of you mentioned I think Nature and Science are good "pop" journals that introduce new research to a wide audience over a wider range of topics, but I am often disappointed by how shallow some of the articles turn out to be. It's not so much about length as it is the effort of analysis/research that ends up in print, so while I think both have their place I do think they're a bit overhyped. I'm sure we've all heard of some scientists who won't publish in anything but Science…

Gas Mileage and Car Accessories (from Car Talk)

First: Car Talk is awesome. I wish I could come up with some class activities that help students become as good at trouble shooting and critical thinking as Tom and Ray are. Anyway, they are quite entertaining. So, my Dad called and told me he heard a discussion on Car Talk about the effect DC to AC converters and accessories plugged in to it and how they would effect gas mileage. I skimmed through the last Car Talk podcast, but couldn't find it. He must have heard a re-run on the radio or something (he doesn't really believe in podcasts). Let me calculate the effect a number of things…

Ken Miller: Expelled from Expelled for his religious views

The more that the producers of Expelled talk, the more they demonstrate their abject idiocy. Chris Heard transcribes part of producer Mark Mathis's discussion with Scientific American: [SciAm editor] Mirsky: Why not also include comments from somebody like Ken Miller— Mathis: Uh— Mirsky: who is famously religious— Mathis: well— [Laughs.] Mirsky: and an evolutionary biologist. Mathis: I would tell you this. And this is keeping in mind who you’re talking to is an associate producer. I don’t make decisions about who gets interviewed, and, and I don’t make decisions about if they’re interviewed…

New Hampshire

Well, Hillary came in two points ahead of Obama in New Hampshire, and 22 points ahead of John Edwards. Edwards insists that he's still in it for the remaining 48 states, but I have a hard time imagining how he will do any better in those states than he did in Iowa, where he camped out for the last 3 years. I wish him luck, though. I'm inclined to agree with the general consensus that Hillary won a lot of support from the asinine obsession various folks (including Edwards, alas) had with her tears the other day. But like publius, I don't think that sexism is ultimately behind Hillary's…

Self-Control is a Muscle

Experiments like this demonstrate why Puritanism is so psychologically unrealistic: A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research looks at the effects of self-restraint on subsequent impulse purchases. In one experiment, college students spent a few minutes free-associating and writing down their thoughts, under instructions not to think of a white bear. Given $10 afterward to save or spend on a small assortment of products, they spent much more money than students who had free-associated without having to avoid thoughts of bears. This isn't the first time people have explored the impact of…

A Science of Medical Performance

Everybody wants to cure cancer and pioneer gene therapy. This sort of scientific discovery, especially when the discovery could have profound consequences, is a worthy ambition. But does this ambition distract us from less appealing but even more important endeavors? Does searching for the miracle cure come at a cost? Atul Gawande, in his new book Better, argues that medical research should search for low-tech improvements (like making doctors more diligent about hand-washing) with the same zeal it lavishes on potential drugs and surgical techniques. He uses the treatment of cystic fibrosis…

Cartesian Metaphors

I've been reading a number of papers on the "science" of consciousness - I'll let the quotes express my skepticism - and I thought this clever metaphor from Francis Crick and Christof Koch, in their influential 2003 Nature review, was revealing. They compare the competition among our sensations to a democratic election, in which all those fleeting stimuli must fight for our limited attentional resources: It may help to make a crude political analogy. The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition…

Ferris Bueller

In the LA Times, Megan Daum has an interesting reflection on the late comedy director John Hughes, and his eccentric cinematic representations of adolescence: If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school in 2009, it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be a candidate for anti-depression therapy. Likewise, if "The Breakfast Club," which is about five teens serving time in Saturday detention, took place in a post-Prozac, post-Columbine America, Ally Sheedy's mostly mute, kleptomaniac misfit would have undoubtedly been medicated, and Anthony Michael Hall's…

Josh Rosenau

Josh Rosenau just spoke, and boy was he brilliant! I felt like I was racing, but I'm told that I didn't trip over myself the way Casey did. I've got tape of the whole thing, so we'll see shortly. Here's what I said: Mr. Chairman, members of the Board, thank you for the chance to speak with you about the draft science TEKS. The science TEKS on the books now were given _an F_ in a 2005 survey of state science standards by the politically conservative Thomas Fordham Institute, noting that "they produce breadth of assertion instead of depth of understanding." The TEKS presented by your expert…

Secretary Sebelius

Following weeks of speculation, President Obama nominated Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services. She will be responsible for shepherding the president's promise of universal health care through Congress, and for carrying out his promises to reform health care in America. In last week's address to Congress, Obama stated: we can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold. [Our budget] includes an historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform – a down-payment on the principle that we must have quality, affordable health care for…

Fish in a barrel

In one episode of Futurama, Fry traps a giant brain in a book he wrote "a crummy world of plot holes and spelling errors." That's what it feels like to read the antics of Dembski and the gang. The latest offense to reason comes from DaveScot (predictably). Upon reading this: First, the germ-free animals lived almost twice as long as their conventionally maintained counterparts, and second, the major causes of death were different in the two groups. Infection often caused death in conventional animals, but intestinal atonia frequently killed germ-free animals. DS immediately thought of…

Experience, common sense, and a guy who probably shouldn't be answering the phone.

I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn't me, but I won't divulge any further identifying details.) Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories -- far too common to merit a blog post -- but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is. So, our nameless protagonist ordered a piece of computer hardware from some company that offered free ground shipping. Said…

The Cold War Vs. The War on Terror

What's scarier? Communists or Islamic Fundamentalists? Stalin or Osama? Although I'm too young to remember the U.S.S.R. - the crumbling Berlin Wall is a vague childhood memory, and my sense of the Soviets came from Rocky 4 - I tend to agree with this sentiment: Although I did duck-and-cover drills as a boy and served two years right at the Iron Curtain as a young man, I don't remember ever being afraid. I can't say the same about the War on Terror, but that may simply be that I know more now than I knew then. So why is the post 9/11 era more frightening than the post 1945 era? After all, the…

Why Run When You Can Pass?

Life is getting tough for the running backs of the NFL. First comes the news that becoming a star rusher doesn't require a Heisman Trophy or even a high-profile start in NCAA Division I-A: The debate has simmered for a decade, at least since the Denver Broncos began making a habit of turning unsung players into 1,000-yard rushers. Other championship-caliber teams, like the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots, began casting aside top running backs, finding younger and cheaper alternatives with no regrets. But the question of whether N.F.L. running backs are overvalued -- generally…