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Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, by Randy Olson

The forthcoming Sizzle, Randy Olson's follow-up to the well-received A Flock of Dodos, is a movie that's trying to do three things at the same time: 1) provide some information about global warming, 2) make a point about how scientific information is presented to the public, and 3) experiment with new ways of presenting scientific information to the public. As often happens with movies that are trying to do multiple things, it's not entirely successful at any of them, but it's a worthy attempt. The film plays as basically a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and a Christopher Guest…

Dapoxetine for Premature Ejaculation

The little guy pictured to the left is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dapoxetine" rel="tag">dapoxetine, a drug under development for the treatment of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_ejaculation" rel="tag">premature ejaculation.   I wrote about this href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2005/05/cns-pipeline-updatewas-dr-angell-right.html">before, in the context of recent criticism of the pharmaceutical industry.  Some have argued that the industry spends too much time and money developing drugs that we no not really need.   That is not too much of a problem, except…

Which ants should we target for genome sequencing?

This weekend, Arizona State University is hosting a slate of myrmecologists to brainstorm on ant genomes.  I'd link to the meeting information, but apparently the gathering is so informal that they've not given the event a web page.  In any case, the topic is this:  in the age of (relatively) cheap genomes, which ants should we sequence? And, what should we do with the assembled data? I originally planned to attend, but life intervenes and I'm frozen to the tundra of central Illinois.  Instead, I will register here a few suggestions about which species should considered, in addition to…

HONcode accreditation for Terra Sigillata

We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy healthinformation: verify here. Regular readers may note that I have been diddling with the content of my left sidebar and posting a new disclaimer tab to indicate the accuracy and objectivity of the health information presented herein. I added these details as part of my application for accreditation by the Swiss-based Health on the Net (HON) Foundation, a non-profit organization formed in 1996 to deal with the then-new issue of how a reader can determine the quality and objectivity of medical information on a website. You…

NEJM on women in medicine leadership; viewpoint from the subject of media attention

About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted: What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as: Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools. When I read that, I…

Toxoplasma - the brain parasite that influences human culture

We like to think that we are masters of our own fates. The thought that others might be instead controlling our actions makes us uneasy. We rail against nanny states, we react badly to media hype and we are appalled at the idea of brainwashing. But words and images are not the only things that can affect our brains and thoughts. Other animals - parasites - can do this too. According to research by Kevin Lafferty from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, could be influencing human culture across the globe. Toxoplasma gondii is a single-…

Carbon nanotubes could behave like asbestos

In the late 19th century, asbestos became a building material of choice. Resistant to heat, electricity and corrosion, it found many uses including  home insulation, brake pads and ship-building. By the time that the first health problems were reported, the material was commonplace. In the UK, the material was only restricted in 1983 after thousands of people were exposed during the post-war era. The result is a latent epidemic of related diseases including a rare type of cancer called mesothelioma, which is becoming more common and is only expected to peak in incidence over the next…

Enormous bacterium uses thousands of genome copies to its advantage

They say that size doesn't matter, but try telling that to bacteria. Most are very small, for they rely heavily on passive diffusion to ferry important nutrients and molecules across their membranes. To ensure that this happens quickly enough, bacteria need to ensure that their surface area is large enough relative to their volume - become too big and they won't be able to import enough nutrients to support their extra size. These constraints greatly limit the size of bacteria. The larger ones solve the problem by being extremely long and slender, or by using an internal compartment called…

How sharks, penguins and bacteria find food in the big, wide ocean

Some of us have enough trouble finding the food we want among the ordered aisles of a supermarket. Now imagine that the supermarket itself is in the middle of a vast, featureless wasteland and is constantly on the move, and you begin to appreciate the challenges faced by animals in the open ocean. Thriving habitats like coral reefs may present the photogenic face of the sea, but most of the world's oceans are wide expanses of emptiness. In these aquatic deserts, all life faces the same challenge: how to find enough food. Now, a couple of interesting studies have shed new light on the…

Who can save science?

We bloggers tend to assume, or at least hope, that blogging is intrisincally a Good Thing. But at this past weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, some even dared ask if we can save science. If that's not a tall order, I don't know what is. The conference drew a couple of hundred veteran bloggers, students and scientists from across the continent and abroad -- including a healthy representation from our own ScienceBlogs.com gang -- to the Sigma Xi headquarters in Research Triangle Park for a day of debate over what blogging can and cannot do, its relationship to journalism,…

Cats manipulate their owners with a cry embedded in a purr

While dogs can often be taught new tricks, cat-owners will be all too aware that it can be very difficult to persuade them to do something they don't want to do. Eddie Izzard summed it up best in his legendary Pavlov's cat sketch, where felines are quite capable of outfoxing (outcatting?) eminent Welsh-Russian psychologists. Real cats may be less devious, but only just - new research suggests that they are very skilled at getting their human owners to do their bidding. When they want food, domestic cats will often purr in a strangely plaintive way that their owners find difficult to ignore…

Hacked emails, tree-ring proxies and blogospheric confusion

One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea: If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll. Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort... I just happen to have at hand a…

Clozapine - Antipsychotic Polypharmacy, Part 1

href="http://www.researchblogging.org"> src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0pt none ;">The article I am discussing in this post is the 2008 Heinz Lehmann Award paper, published in the open-access Canadian journal, Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience.  It really covers two topics: href="http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/clinicalresearch/overview-translational.asp">translational research, and antipsychotic polypharmacy in which one of the antipsychotic medications is clozapine.  href="http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/…

Bad Science at the Pentagon

Traumatic Brain Injury href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/08/traumatic_brain_injury_on_the.php">has been called the "signature injury" of the Iraq War, due to the reported high prevalence of the injury there.  This is in contrast to previous wars.  It's not that head injury is necessarily more common; what is more common is for soldiers to sustain such injuries and survive.  The Pentagon has recognized this, and ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/05/signing_a_check_for_iraqs_sign.php">reportedly) is addressing it.  But now, a paper published in NEJM…

The Unwritten Self

"A world without memory is a world of the present," Alan Lightman wrote in Einstein's Dreams. "The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life...Without his Book of Life, a person is a snapshot, a two-dimensional image, a ghost." Most people would probably agree with Lightman. Most people think that our self -knowledge exists only through the memories we have amassed of our selves. Am I a kind person? Am I gloomy? To answer these sorts of questions, most people would think you have…

Spite in a Petri Dish

Spiteful bacteria. Two words you probably haven't heard together. Then again, you probably haven't heard of altruistic bacteria either, but both sorts of microbes are out there--and in many cases in you. Bacteria lead marvelously complicated social lives. As a group of University of Edinburgh biologists reported today in Nature, a nasty bug called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which causes lung infections, dedicates a lot of energy to helping its fellow P. aeruginosa. The microbes need iron, which is hard for them to find in a usable form in our bodies. To overcome the shortage, P. aeruginosa can…

Time to Stop Blaming Climate Skeptics for Societal Inaction

One of the arguments I have been making in talking to journalists is to beware the hype over the relative impact of the climate skeptics movement in contributing to societal inaction on climate change. As many studies, articles, and experts have documented and described, the impact of the skeptic movement is only one of several significant contributors to political gridlock and perceptual differences on climate change. In a recent blog post on Copenhagen, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus adeptly argue this point. I don't agree with all of their post and I don't share the same…

#7: The Candy Hierarchy (Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)

Moving along (see here), the order of quality for Halloween candy has been a source of constant conversation for years in my family. Since my kids became full-on trick-or-treaters a few years ago, it seemed necessary to get down to the science of it. That led to the first hierarchy, in 2006, which was supplemented with revised versions in 2007 and 2008. The version below was posted in October 2008 The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006. After further (non-anonymous) peer review, we pushed into the second phase of the research in 2007. We are proud to…

Chemicals, health, and justice at a crossroads (or, the fundamentally political nature of environmental issues)

"The [Environmental Justice (EJ)] movement," writes Gwen Ottinger, "was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color. EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this 'environmental racism.' Currently, however, it is not equality but health that dominates grassroots activists' campaigns against chemical contamination." Ottinger is a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's (CHF) Center for Contemporary History and…

Things that are different: Life and Science in the city of Harbin

(I didn't actually see this sign, which I got via Shelley, but I put it up because my talk later today will actually break rule number 3.) Well, I've been in China for the better part of three days now, having spent a few hours in Shanghai, and the remainder of my time in Harbin (North China). It's been lovely so far, and my hosts are pretty much all kinds of awesome. The visit has been interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the opportunity to go to Shanghai for a few hours, and to try and get a feel for the place. Basically, Shanghai struck me like any other major, high rolling,…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (5/5/08)

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.) Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to: If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary…

Cognition and Emotion are not Separate

This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates the popular impression of the brain in our society (and more than a few scientific discussion) -- is fundamentally wrong: In this Perspective I will make a case for the notion, based on current knowledge of brain function and connectivity, that parcelling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inherently problematic, and ultimately untenable for at least…

Oreskes responds to Schulte

Many readers will no doubt know the 2004 paper in Science by historian of science Naomi Oreskes, a paper which discussed the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. Predictably, the paper received much vitriol from the climate contrarians and denialists. Now, a medical research (Klaus-Martin Schulte, who appears to be a consultant in endocrine surgery) has claimed that Oreskes’ paper is not only outdated but also wrong. This claim has been extensively crowed over not only by Inhofe’s EPW Press Blog but by other Right wing sites and, indeed, our own beloved Uncommon Descent…

Thanksgiving Dinner with a Side of ER

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I was reading the Web this morning, and this story reminded me of a Thanksgiving a couple years ago. The news story is about how Thanksgiving dinner can cause flareups of gout. Gout -- if you don't know -- is an inflammatory joint disease caused by the deposition of little crystals of uric acid. Uric acid is a compound found in many types of food and drink. It is actually a product of purine metabolism (purine is a component of DNA). Foods that have the most purines are meats -- particularly sweat meats. Here is a list of danger foods. Eating lots of…

COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE: Revkin Describes an "Invisible Middle" of Scientists Concerned Over 'Pandora's Box' Claims of Pending Catastrophe

Over the weekend, Andrew Revkin at the NY Times wrote a very timely and important peice detailing the growing unease among many scientists and policy experts with the new "normal' in the framing of global warming by environmental advocates, journalists, and even some scientists. This new frame I label the "Pandora's box" interpretation, and it's something I've detailed in recent months here at Framing Science, and in several talks here in DC. Advocates use this interpretation to define global warming as a looming catastrophe of unknown and devastating consequences that requires immediate…

A Switch is Born

The language of DNA is written in a four-letter alphabet. The four different chemical units of DNA (called nucleotides) create an incomprehenisbly vast range of possibility codes. Consider a short sequence of 41 nucleotides. There are over 4.8 trillion trillion possible sequences it could take. In this vast universe of possibilities, how can natural selection hit on new DNA sequences that help life survive? All living things have genes. Enzymes read those genes and produce a copy of their code, which a cell can then use to build a protein. But in order to read a gene, the enzymes must first…

Optimizing Cognition for Multi-threading: How 2 hours of training can make multitasking more efficient

New work by Minear & Shah shows that as little as 2 hours of practice can promote improvements in multitasking that generalize beyond the particular tasks trained. Specifically, they show that performance on individual tasks can be made more efficient while multitasking, but the efficiency of actually switching between them cannot. The data supporting this conclusion is fairly complex, but significantly adds to theoretical accounts to a number of previous studies showing that even the highest levels of cognitive processing (the so-called "executive functions") can be improved with…

Novelty and Unacknowledged Confounds In Cognitive Psychology

To efficiently direct learning, it may be useful for the brain to attend to those items which are maximally novel - this novelty may obscure some predictive or rewarding value that has not yet been learned or exploited. This is widely acknowledged, usually in passing; but ambiguities in what counts as "novel" have profound and unacknowledged consequences for research on high-level cognition (generalization, rule-use, etc). But let's start with what we do know about novelty processing in the brain. As would be expected from a creature that has much to learn, infants show a very robust "…

Social vs. Cognitive Development: Social Factors or Small Sample Sizes in AB?

My friend Geoff once said that "all cognition is social." Smugly, I reminded myself that the conclusions of cognitive psychologists are drawn on evidence where social cues are kept constant. But even in the absence of confounding social cues, perhaps the underlying cognitive processes themselves are caused by social factors. A great example of this comes from today's issue of Science, in which Topal et al describe how a well known "cognitive" phenomenon - perseveration - may be dramatically influenced by social cues. Topel et al focus on a situation in which very young infants will…

Ann Coulter, Hate Speech, and Free Societies

Ann Coulter is a vicious and mean-spirited demagogue and I'm ashamed that I share more DNA with her than chimpanzees or bonobos. She represents the worst kind of reactionary partisanship and should be condemned by all quarters in the spirit of basic decency. That being said, however, I don't believe a government should have any role in prohibiting her speech, regardless of how offensive it is. And it's pretty offensive. Just after the Sept. 11 attacks Coulter wrote, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." This got her fired from the column…

Ideological State Interface

The North Korean government has made an operating system called "Red Star." Despite the fact that very few North Koreans have a computer, let alone Internet access, Red Star is designed to provide a safe operating environment in line with North Korean political philosophy of "juche," or self-reliance (as well as, admittedly, monitor user activity). The Red Star O.S. takes fifteen minutes to install, uses a popular Korean folk song as its start-up music and features a calendar which starts counting time from the birth of Kim Il-sung, making 2010 the year 99. Amazingly, it's Linux-based, with…

Gravity's Rainbow

There are, as far as the layman is concerned, two kinds of scientific truth. At one end of the spectrum -- the gamma ray end, if we use the electromagnetic spectrum as a model -- there are the kinds of concepts we associate with science's grand design, the truths which permeate the dark depths of the unknown universe. These are the terrifying, metaphysical truths: unifying cosmic theories, the afterlife, quantum mechanics. Entire disciplines orbit these, while the average person has only a nebulous idea of what they even represent. On the short-wave radio end, there are those forces governing…

Painting lines on the playground - easiest physical activity intervention. EVER.

  Image by Duchamp. In most developed nations, kids get far less physical activity than they did just a few generations ago.  Given the strong links between physical inactivity and health risk (and given that we're now seeing "adult" diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes in children and teenagers), this has become a very real public health concern.  Unfortunately, when it comes to increasing childhood physical activity levels, people often want to reinvent the wheel.  For example, many people are enthralled with the Nintendo Wii as a means of increasing childhood physical…

GRRR...

OK, I apologize in advance for the general venting that is about to occur. But, in my defense, people really bug me sometimes. I posted my post 'Take 30 Seconds to Save Sea Turtles' at another website and got this response: Is there evidence anywhere that any shallow internet poll has ever actually determined any government policy? I donât mean to be rude, just blunt: what possible reason would a foreign government have to respect your wishes? Itâs mostly the laz-ee-boy attitude that I think gets to me, the idea that it might be possible to stop resource waste or whatever by sitting comfy in…

On Universities, Wealth, and Research Funding

A couple of years ago, I went to a meeting for junior faculty at Vanderbilt about the tenure process. The ostensible goal of the meeting was to help us feel more comfortable by letting us better understand the process. The practical upshot for me, at least, was to ratchet up the tenure stress another notch or two, as well as add to the growing sense of despair I had about the whole thing. Today, Chad points to an article in Inside Higher Ed about the size of university endowments. You know, those universities that have been increasing student tuitions at rates much faster than the rate of…

With their powers combined... it's a science writing workshop!

I arrived in North Carolina on Thursday night at around 6 pm. The next morning, I was barely coherent, after an amazing keynote speech, open mic night, and far too late an evening involving ocean bloggers and alcohol. I managed to cup some coffee, then make my way to my first blogging related event of the conference: "Death to Obfuscation: on the use of language in science writing" by none other than the power-packed duet of Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer. It's hard to walk into a room containing these two brilliant writers and not feel a little self-conscious. They are, in the science blogging…

Climate change won't cause the largest spread of dengue fever - we will.

Of course, the climate change won't help, either. At least that is the claim of a new study published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The researchers used computer models using ecological modelling ("GARP") to project the distribution of dengue fever's carrier, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, under today's climate and under climate change scenarios for 2030 and 2050 given published temperature rises. They wanted to know if climate change was likely to expand the mosquito's range in Australia, leading to increased risk of dengue outbreaks. Dengue fever is nothing to be trifled with. It's…

Pepsico, Scienceblogs, and the Future

This is not the post I though I'd be putting up today. This morning, I fully expected to come home from work, post my already-written "I quit" post, and point you all to a WordPress blog I set up yesterday. As of this moment, I'm not leaving Sb. As of this time next week, who knows? As some of you have gathered, a lot of the bloggers here have frustrations with Seed that extend well beyond the Pepsipocalypse, pressures that, in some cases, have already led bloggers to quit. I'm certainly in the frustrated group, and to be honest I was strongly considering moving on well before the latest…

The Texas Nurse Trial - How Did We Get Here?

The more I look at the circumstances that lead up to the criminal prosecution of a nurse in Texas for informing the State Medical Board of her concerns with a local physician, the more I wind up wondering just how things wound up where they are. It's easy - and far from inaccurate - to view this as a case of the good ol' boy network gone bad, or as an example of a quack doctor twisting the system to turn the accusers into the accused. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm starting to think that we've really been looking at part of the picture. We've been missing something that's…

Representative Joe Barton Brings The Stupid On Climate Change.

Yesterday, the Daily Kos and ThinkProgress reported on some spectacularly inane things that Texas Representative "Smokey Joe" Barton said about carbon dioxide. Now, Barton getting something wrong that involves science or the environment is, of course, nothing new. He is, after all, the man who recently Twittered his pride at "stumping" the Nobel Laureate Energy Secretary with a question that actually demonstrated nothing more than Barton's own ignorance of basic geology. As revealing as that whole little incident was, he managed to make more mistakes yesterday. Barton committed the errors…

Female-Friendly Physics Departments

Sooooo beautiful. You must read what Pat has to say about APS's CSWP compiling a list of female-friendly physics departments. And follow the links therein. Here's how my various alma maters responded to this survey question: Please describe why someone applying to graduate school who is interested in a female-friendly department should choose your department. Duke University The physics department at Duke University has quite a few females. Interaction among the women of this department is encouraged by having lunch together a few times a year among and other social events. I am told by…

Mosquito love songs

It's July in Minnesota, and you know what that means: bugs. Clouds of bugs. Some people complain, but I generally rationalize a large population of fecund invertebrates as simply a sign of a healthy ecosystem, so yeah, we've got bugs, but it's good for us. Except for those mosquitoes. It's hard to think charitably of some invertebrates when you're lying in bed at night and you hear…that…high-pitched whine rising as the nearly invisible little blood-sucker buzzes by your exposed flesh. Now, in a discovery calculated to increase my irritation, I learn that the little bastards are singing a love…

"Conversations About The Tribe"

Dr. Free-Ride has graciously put the slides from her talk at the Science Blogging Conference on the conference wiki, so I'm thinking I can go ahead and blog about the stuff I thought I couldn't blog about in my earlier post. Specifically, Dr. Free-Ride spent some time talking about conversations that happen in the blogosphere that might not otherwise take place. She enumerated and categorized these. Her basic categories were as follows: Educational Conversations Political Conversations Conversations About the Scientific Literature The Virtual Scientific (or Lab) Meeting Conversations…

I get email

Would you believe I still get lots of mail from devout Catholics? I still even get these nice heartfelt letters via regular mail from little old Catholic ladies who think their flowery stationery will finally bring me around to the faith. But mainly I get something out of the blue where I can tell someone has stumbled onto one article that has offended them deeply, and they write to berate me for it. They usually don't even bother to tell me what it is that has annoyed them so, not that it really matters. Article I am always amazed when I read an article such as yours and have a chance to…

The X-Gals on Motherhood and ChildCare

The latest installment in the X-Gals series is out: Life As A Mother-Scientist. Subtitle: The X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists, see a direct correlation between their productivity and their child care. Note that last phrase: the link is not between productivity and having children. It's between productivity and child care. Access to it, quality of available child care, sudden unpredictable collapse of previously arranged child care, difficulty of obtaining child care for very young infants or sick children, and so on. When good child care arrangements are in place,…

Fear and Loathing from the Discovery Institute

Very early this morning, the Discovery Institute's Rob Crowther posted an article over at the DI's "why's everyone always picking on us" blog. I'm not exactly sure what inspired Rob to get some work done late on a Saturday night, but the result is an article that's so chock full of hysterically absurd misrepresentations and bizarre claims that it's impossible to resist the urge to comment. The apparent cause for Rob's rant was his displeasure with an op-ed that was published in the Austin American-Statesman on Friday. The op-ed was written by the past-president, president, and president-…

Keeping the gun to the Army's head.

President Bush today continued his efforts to extort money from Congress by holding the American Military hostage. In a speech made to soldiers at Fort Irwin, California, Bush stayed on his basic message: give me the money with no strings attached or the troops are going to get hurt: Just as the strategy is starting to make inroads, a narrow majority in the Congress passed legislation they knew all along I would not accept. Their bills impose an artificial deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. Their bills substitute the judgment of Washington politicians for the judgment of our military…

It's like shooting ducks in a barrel

Another critical mass of climate change pseudoskeptics will be gathering today for an D.C. lunch event titled "The Climategate Scandals: What Has Been Revealed And What Does It Mean?" It features: Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute and Joseph D'Aleo of ICECAP and is being hosted by Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. More on the speakers and hosts later, but first, let's look at the description of the event, which appears on the invitation reproduced by invitee Sheril "Intersection" Kirshenbaum: The scientific case for catastrophic…

Obstacle No. 64 to dealing with climate change: The cult of celebrity

The news that Sarah Palin has found a new platform for her particular take on reality brings to mind one of the biggest obstacles to the development of meaningful action on the climate change front -- or any other serious public policy challenge, for that matter. Palin is more akin to Paris Hilton or Pia Zadora than she is to most other public figures in two ways. First, she brings no obvious talent or experience to the public sphere, just popularity afforded her first by the electorate of a small and politically quirky state, and by the last man standing in one of the weakest fields of…

Randomness wrap-up

This week's article on the "most random" number was the most popular post ever on Cognitive Daily. The stats aren't all in yet, but so far the post has been viewed at least 40,000 times. It wasn't long ago that 40,000 was a good month for Cognitive Daily! Since comments and questions about the project were spread over at least four different threads, as well as at least a dozen posts on other blogs, I thought I'd sum up some of the questions about our poll and the results in one place. We polled 347 CogDaily readers, asking them to simply "think of a random number between 1 and 20," and found…