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Homosexuality, Iran and Identity

In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia: What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don't consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with "gayness." The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn't constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the "top," or active, role. This…

Activity increasing at Tungurahua in Ecuador

Tungurahua erupting in an undated AP photo (although I think it is the current 2010 activity.) It hasn't really made it to much of the English-speaking news, but the current eruptive activity at Tungurahua appears to be on the up-tick. Hugo Yepes of the Geophysical Institute of Ecuador suggests that a larger eruption is not out of the question (link in spanish), but right now the activity is confined to explosions (vulcanian?) and ash fall around the region, specifically on Pillates and Choglontus overnight (2/1) from the ~ 2 km / 5 000 foot plume. Looking at the specifics (link in spanish…

Proud Homophobe gets just deserts

I remember Joycelyn Elders. The woman was appointed to the position of surgeon general, and when asked about masturbation at a conference on AIDS, she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." It was a perfectly ordinary comment about something nearly everyone does or has done, and she got fired for it, by Bill Clinton. It was part of my disillusionment and disappointment with the Democrats. Now look who Obama has appointed to a team to assist with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: Jonathan I. Katz. He's not quite a climate change denialist,…

Ben Stein, classy to the last

Remember when Ben Stein, promoting his schlockumentary in Canada, dismissed the ADL's concerns about his mistreatment of the Holocaust by saying "it's none of their fucking business"? Classy, right? Anyway, having been booted from the pages of the New York Times for violating the paper's ethics policy, Stein is now shilling in decidedly down-market conservative rags. Today, he takes to The American Spectator to defend accused rapist and IMF Managing Director. It is a paragon of the art of bad-faith arguments. The highlights of his 8-point defense: 1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent…

Shorter Disco. 'Tute: Facts are stupid things

So remember how I posted a thing about how "critical analysis" is just another Marxist/postmodernist catchphrase adopted by fundamentalists to advance their religious/political agenda? I thought it was interesting, but relatively uncontroversial. Rob Crowther, Disco. 'Tute's scribe in residence, objects not because of the basic thesis of the piece, but because I didn't clearly indicate that Crowther thinks Camille Paglia is a creationist. That, at least, is what I take him to mean by saying I "impl[ied] the exact opposite" of this: Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global…

Yes please

Last December, I called for nationalizing the securities ratings firms, companies that propped up Big Shitpile through its heyday and actively encouraged the idiotic and destructive practices which brought us to the current economic crisis. Barry Ritholz reveals that the rating agencies may just get their comeuppance at last. Calpers, the giant California public employees retirement fund, is suing the raters: Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance)…

Thoughts on Texas

Berlanga and Nuñez voted against the final TEKS, the other 13 voted to approve them. Texas has new science standards. Those standards are better than the old ones, but those old standards really did suck. As the Fordham Institute put it, giving the standards an F in 2005, "Thematic unities, so persuasively urged in the national guides, have an effect here opposite to that advertised. They produce breadth of assertion instead of depth of understanding. … In the science discipline content here reviewed, Texas provides, by way of scant substance or careless writing or plain errors, something…

Smarter people go to college, so average university students less intelligent?

My post below elicited a lot of response. One thing to point out though, which I want to emphasize: a higher proportion of smart people go to college now than in the past. How can this be? First, let's review the change in distributions of intelligence of those with college degrees (or higher) and those without. The first two charts show the proportions of WORDSUM scores for individuals with and without college degrees for two decades. I limited the sample to whites ages 30 and over. So for example in the period between 1974-1984, of those with college degrees and higher 26.8% scored 10 on…

Slate publishes pieces my A.P. history teacher would laugh at

Unlike many bloggers I'm not too invested in politics, nor do I have a deep knowledge of the topic (though I do have a strong interest in quantitative political science). But I read political pieces in the same way I read sports columns: entertaining analyses which serve as brain candy. Nevertheless, the candy needs to pass a minimal threshold of intellectual palatability. I'm a Celtics fan, and was excited to see their first championship of my adulthood last year, but any sports writer that throws up a column which asserts that the 2007-2008 team was the greatest of all time would be too…

Hannity and Carlson dislike science

As yet another examples of the derangement of conservative thought, Sean Hannity has been pushing a list of 102 examples of 'wasteful' stimulus spending. I don't quite get it; this is money the government is disbursing to encourage jobs for the sake of jobs, and if they were hiring people to dig holes and fill them in again, it would accomplish their task. However, the money is being spent sensibly on projects that also improve the nation's infrastructure in small ways and increase knowledge. One of the targets of their scorn are science projects, including this one, improving the facilities…

I get email

Here we go again. Ross Olson is sending more patronizing email, so I guess I'll have to be mean and tear up his prior argument. November 18, 2009 Dr. Myers, Thank you for posting my comments and promising to comment on the questions I raised. Here is the introduction I gave to your debate with Dr. Jerry Bergman on the topic, "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in the Schools?" on http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/i_get_email_47.php Although many of us on the ID side did not think our arguments were clearly presented, we were pleased with the civil tone and actual intellectual…

Hox genesis

One of the hallmark characters of animals is the presence of a specific cluster of genes that are responsible for staking out the spatial domains of the body plan along the longitudinal axis. These are the Hox genes; they are recognizable by virtue of the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain, by similarities in sequence, by their role as regulatory genes expressed early in development, by the restriction of their expression to bands of tissue, by their clustering in the genome to a single location, and by the remarkable collinearity of their organization…

House Republicans say 'nay' to new mine safety reforms, no questions left about which side they're on

Just two weeks ago, families of the 29 men who were killed on April 5, 2010 at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine traveled to Washington DC to urge lawmakers to improve our nation's mine safety law.   The West Virginia natives met with Republican and Democratic Members of Congress and asked for four simple reforms targeted at the mining industry's bad actors.   They weren't asking anything for themselves.  Only for new laws to help deter unscrupulous employers from causing another disaster and causing other communities to suffer the same pain and loss the UBB families have endured.…

Step One: Change Disciplines

Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows that we do in the sciences: She did a run-through, and then we sat down together and reworked the first three pages to set up the project more clearly and helpfully for her listeners, and then we designed a handout to help her audience situate her…

What does "Global Warming" mean?

The Problem with terminology There is some confusion about the way we talk about global warming. Most of this confusion arises during the communication of science to the public or to policy makers. Part of this confusion rests within the science itself; There is no meaningful confusion about the nature of global warming or how it is observed, but there are some terminological glitches of the kind that arise in science all the time, and that rarely matter to the science itself. The most commonly used indicator of global warming is a graph that is meant to show the effects of global warming…

The cost of commemorating 9/11 exceeds the benefit. Bin Laden, dead, continues to win.

This is a preface to the preface to a piece I wrote in 2011. I have only this to add: First as an aside, I suspected Trump could win the presidency, most people simply said it was impossible. But nonetheless, I was just as shocked as anyone else. Here's the thing. American culture reacted to 9/11 in ways that are mostly harmful. Various aspects of culture tend to reside in specific, though often vaguely defined, entities, such as classes taught in schools, crap kids say to each other on playgrounds, religious ceremony, TV shows, etc. Sometimes parts of culture tend to hold, brew, evolve…

The Most Important Earth Day

It is possible that this is the most important Earth Day. Earth Day is part of the process of broadening environmental awareness and causing positive change in how we treat our planet. We are at a juncture where we must make major changes in what we do or our Grandchildren, to the extent that they can take time away from the daunting task of survival in a post-Civilization world, will curse us. I wrote a massive multpart blog post about Earth Day a four years ago, and here I'm giving you a slightly modified version of it, covering just a few aspects of the thing, and telling a couple of…

Storm World by Chris Mooney (Book Review)

Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming I've been putting off posting my review of this book until just the right moment. Perhaps that moment is now, with the juxtaposition of a serious storm ... hurricane Gustav ... arriving in the vicinity of New Orleans and the opening day of the Republican National Convention, since both charismatic hurricanes and not so charismatic politicians play such a large role in the book at hand. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, by Chris Mooney, is a well written, informative, captivating,…

Against units in biology

The living world, it seems to me, causes no end of trouble for those who would classify it. Its levels, ranks, hierarchies and units all seem to be clear enough, until we encounter troublesome cases. Then they get very troublesome indeed. So I want to say, there are no ranks or set units in biology a priori, and very few and limited, a posterori. Suppose we take one instance: the "units of selection debate" that was so widely discussed after the publication of a number of seminal works in the 1960s and 1970s. Genes were held to be what evolved, against group selectionists who thought…

Combating Injury with Information: Gender Differences in Cognition

I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition? OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this with people you don't know well, but I do. Anyway, it got me thinking that I should post a summary of what is known. Much has been argued about the relevance of differences in cognition. Larry Summers lost his job over it. Ben Barres wrote a lovely editorial about it -- that we all talked about at length (my stuff is here, here, and here). The Economist has an…

Thinking (and writing) about how we think

I read Scibling Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide some time ago, but Moveable Type ate my half-finished review, and it's taken me until now to get back to it. You may have seen quite a few reviews elsewhere by now - Adam Kepecs reviewed it for Nature back in April, and to make a long story short, I largely agree with him: Lehrer is a very good writer, but this is not a great book. Lehrer starts his book with an airplane anecdote, so I'll do the same - although his opening anecdote is about crashing a plane (albeit a simulated plane), so I'm not sure I'd recommend the book for nervous flyers.…

Independent confirmation and open inquiry (investigation? examination?): Purdue University and the Rusi Taleyarkhan case.

My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system. To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…

Yet another antivaccine meme rises from the grave again: No, Diane Harper doesn't hate Gardasil

Yet another zombie antivaccine meme rises from the grave to join its fellows Oh, no, not again! It was just two days ago that I decided to take on a zombie antivaccine meme that just keeps rising from the dead over and over and over again. I'm referring to the claim that Andrew Wakefield has been exonerated by legal rulings compensating children for alleged MMR-induced vaccine injury. As I pointed out, this particular claim is a steaming, stinking turd with no science (or even facts) behind it. As I further explained, even if a court rules that vaccines cause autism, that is not scientific…

"Energy chelation" therapy: Scientific criticism meets common tropes of CAM apologists

It's amazing how fast six months can pass, isn't it? Well, almost six months, anyway, as it was five and a half months ago that I wrote about a particularly execrable example of quackademic medicine in the form of a study that actually looked at an "energy healing" modality known as "energy chelation" as a treatment for cancer chemotherapy-induced fatigue. Actually, the study design itself wasn't so bad, leaving aside the utter ludicrousness of the concept of "energy chelation." Rather, it was how the authors spun interpreted their results that set my head spinning. Surprisingly, a letter to…

A "disinformation campaign" against homeopathy?

Oh goody. Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody. As I sat down to lay down a bit of the old ultrainsolence on a hapless bit of psuedoscience, I was near despair. For whatever reason, there didn't appear to be anything new out there for me to sink my teeth into. True, when this has happened in the past, I've often delved deep into the Folder of Woo in search of tasty tidbits of quackery saved for just this eventuality, but I really hate to do that. After all, it might be good to apply science, critical thinking, and reason to a particularly nonsensical bit of pseudoscience (which is fun) or to a…

Dr. Egnor's deviously clever plan to destroy Darwinism once and for all

Well, well, well, well. I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…

Storm World by Chris Mooney (Book Review)

Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming I've been putting off posting my review of this book until just the right moment. Perhaps that moment is now, with the juxtaposition of a serious storm ... hurricane Gustav ... arriving in the vicinity of New Orleans and the opening day of the Republican National Convention, since both charismatic hurricanes and not so charismatic politicians play such a large role in the book at hand. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, by Chris Mooney, is a well written, informative, captivating,…

Another child sacrificing himself on the altar of irrational belief

Regular readers here know that I really hate to see stories like the one I'm about to discuss, specifically that of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, a boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who is refusing chemotherapy based on religion and his preference for "alternative" therapy, whose parents are also supporting his decision. Since I'm a bit behind on this story, its having percolated through the blogosphere for the last three or four days, let me start with a bit of context. If there is one theme that I've emphasized time and time again here, it's science- and evidence-based medicine. That means…

Five years

Has it really been that long? It was a dismally overcast Saturday five years ago when, on a whim after having read a TIME Magazine article about how 2004 was supposedly the Year of the Blogger, I sat down in front of my computer, found Blogspot, and the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence was born. If anyone is curious, this was my first test post, and this was my first substantive post (well, sort of). Every year (at least the ones where I remember my blogiversary, I find it particularly interesting to go back to the beginning and see how true to my original vision for this blog I've…

The USPSTF mammography guidelines and African American women: Do they even apply?

A while back I wrote about really rethinking how we screen for breast cancer using mammography. Basically, the USPSTF, an independent panel of physicians and health experts that makes nonbinding recommendations for the government on various health issues, reevaluated the evidence for routine screening mammography and concluded that for women at normal risk for breast cancer, mammography before age 50 should not be recommended routinely and should be ordered on an individualized basis, and that routine formalized breast self-examination (BSE) should also not be routinely recommended. In…

An 'error' is not the same thing as an error

A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to stop the distribution of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to British schools. Justice Burton agreed that "Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate." There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie. Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific…

Institutional review boards overreaching?

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are the cornerstone of the protection of human subjects in modern biomedical research. Mandated by the federal government in the 1970's in the wake of research abuses of the 20th century, in particular the the horrors of the infamous Nazi biomedical experiments during World War II that were documented in during the Nuremberg trials and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which black men with syphilis in rural Alabama were followed without treatment in order to study the natural course of the disease, a study that lasted into the early 1970's. In the wake of…

The antivaccine movement wins in Oregon: Senate Bill 442 is dead

How quickly things change. If there's one thing I always feel obligated to warn my fellow pro-science advocates about vaccines and the antivaccine movement, it's that we can never rest on our laurels or assume that the tide is turning in our direction. The reason is simple: Antivaccinationism is a powerful belief system, every bit as powerful as religion and political ideology. It's powerful not just among antivaccinationists, but also because it taps into belief systems that are very much part and parcel of being an American. In fact, depressingly, yesterday I learned of a perfect example of…

How do we know how bad the Swine Flu is so far?

I spent about 45 minutes yesterday in the local HMO clinic. They had turned the main waiting room into a Pandemic Novel A/H1N1 Swine (nee Mexican) Influenza quarantine area, and I could feel the flu viruses poking at my skin looking for a way in the whole time I was there. Amanda, who is 8.3 months pregnant, started getting symptoms of the flu two days ago. As a high school teacher in a school being affected in a state being affected (as most are) she is at high risk for this. She was one of the first people around here to get the vaccine, just a couple of days ago, but it takes about 10…

When clinical trials are designed by the marketing department

I must be slipping. Well, not really. It doesn't bother me that blog bud and fellow skeptical physician PalMD beat me to an important publication that came out a couple of days ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine. I'm a surgeon and a translational/basic scientist; so Annals is not usually one of the journals I read regularly. I usually read individual studies as I find out about them referenced elsewhere, usually Eureka Alert! or when an Annals study sufficiently interesting to motivate me to surf on over to the website and download the article. Be that as it may, this article is highly…

Why, Medscape, why? Or: Gardasil is hunky-dory except when antivaccinationists say it's not.

THWOMP! THWOMP! THWOMP! TWHOMP! THWOMP! TWHOMP! That's the sound of me hitting my head against the table. Hard. What provoked this reaction in me is Medscape, specifically an article that my blog bud PalMD turned me on to. That the article, entitled HPV Vaccine Deemed Safe and Effective, Despite Reports of Adverse Events, seems to have been written in response to criticism of its previous article on the HPV vaccine Gardasil, both by me and others, criticism that led Medscape to quietly pull the old article, makes the resultant article seem even worse, particularly in wake of a truly dumb poll…

Autism clusters and "toxins"

Time to get back to business after yesterday's festivities. One of the items of Gospel Truth among the "autism biomed" movement, which consists of people who fervently believe that autism is caused by some sort of external "toxin," infection, or vaccines and that subjecting children to various forms of quackery designed either to "detoxify" or reverse whatever physiological derangement believed to be at the root of autism will "recover" these children from autism. Of course, there are a lot of antivaccine believers in the autism biomed movement, and arguably the vast majority of "autism…

Ovarian failure caused by Gardasil? Not so fast...

Well, I'm home. AFter spending a fun-filled three days in Nashville at CSICon communing with fellow skeptics and trying to awaken them to the problem of quackademic medicine, I made it back home. There were plenty of attendees who didn't make it back on time because flights to the East Coast were being cancelled left and right, courtesy of Hurricane Sandy. For example, Steve Novella and the entire SGU crew were forced to rent a van and drive 950 miles to Boston after their flight was cancelled sometime Saturday night. Difficulties aside, if there's one thing that almost always happens…

The MEND™ protocol for Alzheimer's disease: Functional medicine on steroids?

A recurring theme of this blog is to shine a light on what I like to call “quackademic medicine.” I didn’t invent the term, but I’ve made it mine. Basically, quackademic medicine is a term that very aptly describes what’s going on in far too many academic medical centers these days, which is the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine and outright quackery in the form of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Of course, the more recent term for CAM is now “integrative medicine,” which was coined to imply the “integration” of alternative medicine with science-based medicine as…

Liveblogging The Genius of Charles Darwin

Here it is, at long last, my take on the first part of The Genius of Charles Darwin. I've included each of the parts available on YouTube and recorded the running time to which each of my comments applies. This may require some scrolling if you're playing the home game. Now that I think of it, it would have been fun to do a Rifftrax-style commentary on each episode, but I don't have the means or know-how to pull that off. I'll also cover parts 2 & 3 in the days to come, but (as I've heard) the very beginning is a very good place to start. False facts are highly injurious to the progress…

The Selfish Genius, mind your manners Dr. Dawkins!

A month ago Larry Moran made reference to Fern Elsdon Baker's new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. Moran was a bit disappointed by the previews, his pet hobby-horse being the revolutionary impact of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, while Elsdon-Baker seems rather fixated on the potential of Neo-Lamarckism, especially epigenetics. Well, I've read the book, and Larry Moran would probably be disappointed, though she mentions Stephen Jay Gould and pluralism a bit, there's really very little engagement with the 20th century debates in evolutionary…

Another Cantor Crank: Representation vs. Enumeration

I've been getting lots of mail from readers about a href="http://knol.google.com/k/are-real-numbers-uncountable#">new article on Google's Knol about Cantor's diagonalization. I actually wrote about the authors argument href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/01/the_continuum_hypothesis_solve.php">once before about a year ago. But the Knol article gives it a sort of new prominence, and since we've recently had one long argument about Cantor cranks, I think it's worth another glance. It's pretty much another one of those cranky arguments where they say "Look! I found a 1:1…

Antisemitic Assholes, and Jewish vs. Israeli

I'm working on more substantive, mathy posts, but in the meantime, I'm pissed, so I'm making a quick off-topic post. With the horrible things that are going on in Gaza right now, I've gotten a raft of antisemitic spam. Most of it has been through private mail, but some has been in comments on the blog. I've mentioned plenty of times on this blog that I'm Jewish. Not Israeli. Jewish. I'm not a member of the Israeli military. I am not a citizen of Israel. I don't get to vote in Israeli elections. I have no say in anything that the state of Israel does. If you're the type of good-for-…

Right-Wing Militarists Beat Father of Marine

If "Gathering of Eagles" needs a new emblem, this one is currently available At the recent anti-war protest in Washington D.C., a pro-war group known as "Gathering of Eagles" assaulted Carlos Arredondo, a father of a Marine killed in Iraq: Carlos Arredondo, 47 year old father of two sons, arrived in the nation's capitol on Monday, 09/10/07 to share a memorial he has made to honor for his eldest son, Alex. Carlos has visited thirty of the United States with the traveling memorial to his son Alexander. Lcpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, USMC was killed on 08/25/04. He was 20 years and 20 days old.…

Now I'm Starting to Get Really Scared That We're Going to...

...attack Iran. Bartcop describes his correspondence with a U.S. naval officer (via maha--thanks...; italics mine): I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.... Always…

The Macroevolution 'Controversy'

I've always thought if the evolutionary biologists who invented the term macroevolution--any evolutionary change at or above the level of species--knew the mischief that the creationists would do with it, they would have 'uninvented' the term right then and there. I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but this post by ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford where he discusses a creationist who misuses macroevolution finally gave me the much needed kick in the assreason to do so. Creationists--some anyway--have built a cottage industry out of claiming that while they might accept '…

Servitude Versus Republicanism: An Argument For Higher Taxes

Thomas Geoghan has an excellent article about the need to raise taxes. He makes a very important point: how we tax ourselves defines who we are. Geoghan writes (italics mine): Sociologists claim someone making $50,000 a year, or $25,000 a year believes: I can be like Gates or Soros. Or my kids will be. It's burned into our brains that Americans believe this. I have a question: In your own life, do you know anyone out there in a suburb with a mortgage who believes this? I sometimes go out to barbecues and parties with clients, and I think of "businessmen" and guys in sales and ask myself, "…

The Charge of the Neocon-Lite Brigade

Former enthusiastic neocon supporters running for cover heroically deploying towards a rearward area. Perhaps it's just human nature, but I've always disliked Johnny-Come-Latelys. It's never made sense to me how those of us who figured out that the Iraq War was going to become a pandimensional clusterfuck (and didn't require special intel or brilliant intellect to do so) are still denigrated and not taken seriously, while those who got it wrong and now admit their mistake are still considered 'serious' thinkers. And not in the sense of 'seriously stupid.' Billmon nails exactly what I…

If you measure the wrong thing, you get the wrong answer: Down's syndrome in Britain

One of the blogs I read regularly is Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science". I recommend it highly. (Which reminds me that I really need to find some time to update my blogroll!) In saturday's entry, he discussed a BBC Radio documentary that described how Britain is becoming a much more welcoming place for Down's syndrome babies. Ben did a good job of shredding it. But I also wanted to take a stab, focusing on the mathematical problem that underlies it, because it's a great example of two very common errors - first, the familiar confusing correlation and causation, and second, using incorrect metrics…

Bad, bad media

The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to the nearest cathedral for consolation, but I guess that's what they have to do now. After all, the convention was an unqualified success, a real triumph for the atheist movement, and they just can't have that. Barney Zwartz is a concern troll. He's a believer; he presumably thinks religion and god…